WASHINGTON, 10 December 2006 — Former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jimmy Carter was able to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt, and has continued to remain in touch with all the key players in the Middle East since leaving the White House.
In his new book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid,” Carter writes about the history of the Middle East and shares what he believes is the key to peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
But his book has led to an outcry among Jewish groups here in the US. They have launched petitions criticizing his use of the word “apartheid” — to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Carter said he stands by his use of the word and cited the sprawling complex of fences, electric sensors and concrete slabs that Israel built along the West Bank of the Jordan River as an example of the divide.
Now, an adviser to Carter and one-time executive director of the Carter Center has publicly parted ways with his former boss, while attacking “the accuracy and integrity” of Carter’s latest book.
In a well-distributed letter, Kenneth Stein said the book was “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions and simply invented segments.”
He added that he can’t even get himself to reprint the name of the book saying, that it has “a title too inflammatory to even print.”
Speaking on National Public Radio yesterday morning, Carter defended his book, noting that there has been more publicity over Stein’s resignation than there has been for his newly-released book.
But criticism continues to grow. Some academics have taken issue with the book, including Alan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard, who called the book “ahistorical,” and David Makovsky, director of the Project on the Middle East Process at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “I was just very saddened by it,” Makovsky said. “I just found so many errors.”
A large group of American Jewish organizations have also protested Carter’s book, saying: “As one who has been a champion for peace in the Middle East, your recent book threatens to undermine the legacy that you worked so hard to achieve. Your criticism of Israel is harsh, unfair and unfounded, and you give slight attention, if any, to factors that undermine your argument.”
On Friday, Carter defended himself in an editorial in the Los Angeles Times, saying: “The many controversial issues concerning Palestine and the path to peace for Israel are intensely debated among Israelis and throughout other nations — but not in the United States. For the last 30 years, I have witnessed and experienced the severe restraints on any free and balanced discussion of the facts. This reluctance to criticize any policies of the Israeli government is because of the extraordinary lobbying efforts of the American-Israel Political Action Committee and the absence of any significant contrary voices. “It would be almost politically suicidal for members of Congress to espouse a balanced position between Israel and Palestine, to suggest that Israel comply with international law or to speak in defense of justice or human rights for Palestinians.”
Carter says that, in many ways, life in the occupied Palestinian territories “is more oppressive than what blacks lived under in South Africa during apartheid. I have made it clear that the motivation is not racism but the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate and colonize choice sites in Palestine, and then to forcefully suppress any objections from the displaced citizens.”
Some Americans have defended Carter. In an editorial entitled: “The Character Asassination of Jimmy Carter,” Ray Hanania writes: “...Jimmy Carter’s main concerns today must be about the character assassination that is taking place because he dared to write something the Israel lobby denounces as a ‘lie.’”
Hanania, continues: “I don’t know if the Israeli policies are or are not apartheid, or apartheid-like. But I do believe that we Americans have a right to debate that issue without the personal attacks against individual character.”
