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Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid | 
 enlarge | Author: Jimmy Carter
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
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Rating:  682 reviews
Sales Rank: 114655
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 288
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Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.4 x 0.9
ISBN: 0743285034
Dewey Decimal Number: 956.04
EAN: 9780743285032
ASIN: 0743285034
Publication Date: September 18, 2007
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The crowning achievement of Jimmy Carter's presidency was the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, and he has continued his public and private diplomacy ever since, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his decades of work for peace, human rights, and international development. He has been a tireless author since then as well, writing bestselling books on his childhood, his faith, and American history and politics, but in Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, he has returned to the Middle East and to the question of Israel's peace with its neighbors--in particular, how Israeli sovereignty and security can coexist permanently and peacefully with Palestinian nationhood. It's a rare honor to ask questions of a former president, and we are grateful that President Carter was able to take the time in between his work with his wife, Rosalynn, for the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity and his many writing projects to speak with us about his hopes for the region and his thoughts on the book. A big thank you to President Carter for granting our request for an interview.
An Interview with President Jimmy Carter
 Q: What has been the importance of your own faith in your continued interest in peace in the Middle East?
A: As a Christian, I worship the Prince of Peace. One of my preeminent commitments has been to bring peace to the people who live in the Holy Land. I made my best efforts as president and still have this as a high priority.
Q: A common theme in your years of Middle East diplomacy has been that leaders on both sides have often been more open to discussion and change in private than in public. Do you think that's still the case?
A: Yes. This is why private and intense negotiations can be successful. More accurately, however, my premise has been that the general public (Jewish, Christian, and Muslim) are more eager for peace than their political leaders. For instance, a recent poll done by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed that 58% of Israelis and 81% of the Palestinians favor a comprehensive settlement similar to the Roadmap for Peace or the Saudi proposal adopted by all 23 Arab nations and recently promoted by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Tragically, there have been no substantive peace talks during the past six years.
Q: How have the war in Iraq and the increased strength of Iran (and the declarations of their leaders against Israel) changed the conditions of the Israel-Palestine question?
A: Other existing or threatened conflicts in the region greatly increase the importance of Israel's having peace agreements with its neighbors, to minimize overall Arab animosity toward both Israel and the United States and reduce the threat of a broader conflict.
Q: Your use of the term "apartheid" has been a lightning rod in the response to your book. Could you explain your choice? Were you surprised by the reaction?
A: The book is about Palestine, the occupied territories, and not about Israel. Forced segregation in the West Bank and terrible oppression of the Palestinians create a situation accurately described by the word. I made it plain in the text that this abuse is not based on racism, but on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land. This violates the basic humanitarian premises on which the nation of Israel was founded. My surprise is that most critics of the book have ignored the facts about Palestinian persecution and its proposals for future peace and resorted to personal attacks on the author. No one could visit the occupied territories and deny that the book is accurate.
Q: You write in the book that "the peace process does not have a life of its own; it is not self-sustaining." What would you recommend that the next American president do to revive it?
A: I would not want to wait two more years. It is encouraging that President George W. Bush has announced that peace in the Holy Land will be a high priority for his administration during the next two years. On her January trip to the region, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has called for early U.S.-Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. She has recommended the 2002 offer of the Arab nations as a foundation for peace: full recognition of Israel based on a return to its internationally recognized borders. This offer is compatible with official U.S. Government policy, previous agreements approved by Israeli governments in 1978 and 1993, and with the International Quartet's "roadmap for peace." My book proposes that, through negotiated land swaps, this "green line" border be modified to permit a substantial number of Israelis settlers to remain in Palestine. With strong U.S. pressure, backed by the U.N., Russia, and the European Community, Israelis and Palestinians would have to come to the negotiating table.
1/18/2007
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From Publishers Weekly
The term "good-faith" is almost inappropriate when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a bloody struggle interrupted every so often by negotiations that turn out to be anything but honest. Nonetheless, thirty years after his first trip to the Mideast, former President Jimmy Carter still has hope for a peaceful, comprehensive solution to the region's troubles, delivering this informed and readable chronicle as an offering to the cause. An engineer of the 1978 Camp David Accords and 2002 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Carter would seem to be a perfect emissary in the Middle East, an impartial and uniting diplomatic force in a fractured land. Not entirely so. Throughout his work, Carter assigns ultimate blame to Israel, arguing that the country's leadership has routinely undermined the peace process through its obstinate, aggressive and illegal occupation of territories seized in 1967. He's decidedly less critical of Arab leaders, accepting their concern for the Palestinian cause at face value, and including their anti-Israel rhetoric as a matter of course, without much in the way of counter-argument. Carter's book provides a fine overview for those unfamiliar with the history of the conflict and lays out an internationally accepted blueprint for peace.
Copyright Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Product Description
PRESIDENT CARTER'S COURAGEOUS ASSESSMENT OF WHAT MUST BE DONE TO BRING PERMANENT PEACE TO ISRAEL WITH DIGNITY AND JUSTICE TO PALESTINE
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| Customer Reviews: Read 677 more reviews...
 Provocative language by a a plain-talking peacemaker. November 28, 2006
Samuel Chell (Kenosha,, WI United States)
1403 out of 1886 found this review helpful
[...]
The constant attempts to denigrate Carter's Presidency (as though the long lines at that shrine to American privilege, the gas pump, and our foreign presence preceding the Iranian hostage crisis were of the President's making and, moreover, of greater consequence than the Iraq debacle) are belied once again by this uncommon man's common sense and clarity of vision, which is mirrored by the measured lucidity of his prose. Someone had to write this book, and better it be Carter, with his personal, and largely effective, negotiations with the principal players in the desperate power struggles of the middle East, than anyone else.
Carter's staunch opposition to the invasion of Iraq is a matter he no longer talked about once the "mission" became reality. His efforts are directed toward future solutions, not righteous reminders of the past or self-justifications, lest he risk mirroring the very narrow, self-serving interests he seeks to confront and redress through proposals based on negotiated peace, mutual respect, shared rights and, above all, on genuine human and religious (including Judeo-Christian) values.
The negative reactions to the book, I'm afraid, prove its importance. Many Americans remained "passively" approving of the Iraq war--despite not just its blatant imperialist aggressiveness but its sheer irrationality and absurdity--because of the perception that somehow America's "holy war," with its pageantry of "shock and awe," was in the interests of Israel. Although Carter's warnings, criticisms, and prescriptions in "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid" require as much of the Palestinians as the Israelis, the criticisms he has received come from narrow, defensive Americans who are incapable of rising to anything resembling an impartial, broad-based understanding of the "human community"--of the "family of man," as it was once called.
This is not a particularly hard-hitting account (its author is, after all, an ingenuous man of peace and good will). So the mean-spirited "hits" the book has been taking should in themselves be seen as a wake-up call--not just to Israelis and Palestinians but to Americans of every religion, ethnicity, class, and political stripe. If we "can't get along together," and if we can't model for the world a tradition-blind, color-blind melting pot instead of viewing that metallic vessel as a grenade, we can hardly pretend to be surprised the next time it blows up in our faces.
Truth is the only thing that will save us January 13, 2007
Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States)
310 out of 504 found this review helpful
President Jimmy Carter does not have a malicious bone in his body, and is one of the most intelligent Presidents we have ever had. His scholarship is NOT off the mark. What is off the mark is the dogmatic refusal of Zionist Jews to listen to reason.
See my reviews of Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books) and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth' for a sense of just how crazy all these people are that are claiming anti-semitism. I have nothing but disdain for the Jews that resigned, for they are disgracing themselves and America by showing so vividly their monstrous disrespect for the truth, for dialog, and for one of the finest Presidents this Nation has ever had (I say this as an estranged moderate Republican).
Reality is not easy. Reality is constantly obscured by corporate media owned by the corporations whose mis-deeds they dare not report, and whose relations with the 45 dictators of the world are beyond cozy--they are self-serving partnerships to loot the commonwealth of nations and leave all publics, not just the Palestinians, in the dirt. See Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Reality is also obscured by a US Congress that now has 43 Jews and only 1 Muslim, a Congress that until very recently abdicated its role as the FIRST branch of government and failed to balance the powers of an imperial presidency run amok (see my reviews of The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy) and Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders. America must be very alert to the dual hijacking of its government by corporations and by Zionist Jews who forget that they used terrorism to win their freedom from England, just as our American founders used terrorism to win the War of Independence.
Terrorism is a tactic. Anyone that does not understand that is either stupid (less likely) or maliciously deceptive (more likely).
It is my rare privilege to be the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction (#48 over-all), and it is on that foundation that I stand today in praise of Jimmy Carter, and in demand of the immediate resignation of Dick Cheney, or his impeachment (see my list on books relevant to evaluating Dick Cheney, and on impeachment for those who cannot wait).
Reality is tough. Lying to ourselves is as good as bullet in our heads. See my varied lists for the reality that is the context for this good book by a good man.
Note: the Arabs are just as despicable as the Jews, for they have treated the Palestinians the way India and Japan treat their untouchables. Nothing in this book, or in my review, should be contrued as forgiving of the Arabs. It is my personal view that the US should disengage from the Middle East and also withhold our support to Israel until such time as it will listen to Jimmy Carter's sound advice, and agree to a shared state without walls--partition, as with India and Pakistan, breeds on-going violence. It is only tolerance and a common commitment to creating shared wealth that works. The Saudi ruling royalty are EVIL. See See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism and Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude. For a more elegant view, see Leap of Faith: Memoirs of an Unexpected Life
Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition) had it right: Palestine is to the Palestinians as France is to the French. Contrary to the dogma and lies that the rabid Jews (as opposed to rational Jews taking the long view) spread, the land *was* occupied by the Palestinians, and the Jews are genociding them the way the early American settlers genocides the Native Americans. No one has clean hands here, but it helps no one at all to demean an honest author and good man, and to falsely claim that this book is anti-semitic. This book is anti-stupid, and I am anti-stupid.
 The debasement of language November 16, 2006
J. A Magill (Sacramento, CA USA)
288 out of 729 found this review helpful
As an avowed believer in the power of diplomacy, one can only wonder at President Carter's debasement of the main tool of the craft -- language. Readers can find much to criticize in this book, but one surely must begin with the title. What ever one thinks of the State of Israel and its policies, it can by no means be described as an Apartheid State. Just as in order to rend emotions now turns all mass murders into genocides, thus weakening the meaning of that rarest and most evil of crimes, so to do many now seek to wrongly apply the term Apartheid to Israel.
Apartheid, the policy of structuring society based on total racial separation, with a powerful upper class and disempowered lower class, was created in South Africa after World War II. By contrast, Israel's citizenry includes 20% Arabs -- a somewhat tortured definition in the Israeli case, as about half of the Jewish population descends from Arab Jews expelled from their nations in the mid-20th century. None claim Israel to be a paradise where minorities experience no discrimination, but in Israel these Muslim and Christian Arabs hold an equal vote to all other citizens and the same freedoms. Paradoxically, these Arabs enjoy more freedom than any Arab citizens of the 22 Arab countries of the Middle East.
Those residing in the West Bank and Gaza, land taken by Israel after the 1967 war obviously are not citizens. Nor do they enjoy full freedom of movement or the right to participate in the Israeli political process. If this situation for Mr. Carter stands as Apartheid, one would need to expand the definition to near meaninglessness, as one would need to similarly identify the French relationship with Algeria in the colonial period in the same manner. Not to mention the US during its occupation of Japan after WWII as another Apartheid situation, as the Japanese lacked a government, could not travel to the US, nor participate in its democracy, even as citizens of Japanese decent, albeit abused during the War, retained such privileges. Obviously, proximity between Israel and the occupied territories creates a different situation, but in terms of legal status, both examples stand as apt.
That aside, President Carter's book follows throughout in a similar vein, shedding much heat and little light, even as it attacks Israel, apologizes or ignores Arab behavior, and often skirts over any fact that fails to fit his thesis. Examples abound. When it comes to UN resolution 242, Carter makes the claim that it insists on total withdrawal from territories occupied in '67, ignoring that neither the definite article `all' or `total' appears in the language and that the diplomats who drafted it have written that this was intentional as they never intended a full withdrawal, but some mutual agreement setting the boundaries between Israel and her neighbors. But then, the book often picks and chooses from international law as though a Chinese menu, citing Resolution 187 as proof of a right of return for the descendants of Arabs who once lived in Israel, but ignoring that the same resolution demands that Jerusalem and Hebron become international cities, managed by the UN, under the control of no nation state. Indeed, the few times the UN advanced a position in Israel's favor, the organization ceases, in Carter's eyes, to be sacrosanct. Thus, he dismisses the UN's findings that The Shaba Farms are occupied not from Lebanon, but from Syria, effectively adopting the Hezbollah position with neither explanation nor notice.
Nor does President Carter miss a chance to give the Arabs a pass. Thus when he quotes Yasser Arafat as saying "`The PLO has never advocated the annihilation of Israel," a strange thing to let stand unchallenged as the PLO Charter and the famous three No's called for just that. Similarly excused is the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Perhaps one might wish to know the process of the author's thinking, but then this is impossible, as he eschews footnotes and citations, even in the case of proposed maps of previous Israeli peace offers.
One could go on at length on the books many shortcomings, its factual errors, the author's mislabeling of events and places, and ignoring historical events that fail to suit President Carter's purpose. In the end this would be exhaustive and unhelpful. Those inclined condemn Israel as the source of every problem in the Middle East, and even the world - will take great comfort in this works one sides stance, reality be damned. However, for those looking to understand either perspective on the conflict in any depth, this slim work offers almost nothing to warrant the price and the time.
It takes courage to speak the truth on Israel. Well done Jimmy January 13, 2007
andreas838 (Geneva, Switzerland)
286 out of 444 found this review helpful
For a people that have experienced so much persecution, it seems improper to criticize Israel's actions. Jimmy Carter has highlighted uncomfortable issues for American Jews (I am also one) to address. It was an important step forward that a well respected personality such as Carter wrote this book. Israel's 'realpolitik' towards the Palestinians is morally unsupportable. Terror has many tactics; it can come from government policies & tanks as well as suicide bombers.
My view is that it is time for American Jews to take the 'blue' pill, wake up and see the reality as it is, not what they wanted or were told it is. It's not a comfortable process to put into question assumptions that were taught since childhood. But blind devotion to a state is dangerous.
As we have seen with the Iraq war, a hard-right government can do things that its people realize is wrong. As is happening now in the US, we need to speak out in favor of a dramatic new course for Israel that may improve the chances for peace. It is high time that American Jews stop giving Israel (their hard-right gov't) a blank check of support irrespective of their actions and begin to treat Israel as the separate state that it is. The extreme right is the enemy of all peace loving people.
Carter's bias and frustration intersect in his latest work January 7, 2007
David Greenfield
206 out of 346 found this review helpful
Perhaps Jimmy Carter's book, the latest in a long series of unremarkable writings, provides an outlet for his longstanding frustration for not being able to achieve a settlement between Israelis and Palestinians at the same time he facillitated the Israel-Egypt Treaty. His book inappropriately inflames reader's thinking by detailing the difficulties born by Palestinians as a result of Israeli policies necessary to provide essential protection for its civilian population from the suicide bombers recruited, financed, trained, sent into Israel with murderous objectives, and then glorified at home. If Carter's intentions were truly to advance the process of coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians he would have provided a treatise for readers to appreciate the issues in the current situation filtered through a full account of ALL the facts on the ground and the history of what preceded them.
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