Former President Jimmy Carter has thrown the proverbial turd into the punchbowl with his new book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. I have it on hold at my local library (I'm number 21 with 5 copies.) I will bring my own report on it when I read it. Until then...

Speaking frankly about Israel and Palestine
Jimmy Carter says his recent book is drawing knee-jerk accusations of anti-Israel bias.
By Jimmy Carter

I SIGNED A CONTRACT with Simon & Schuster two years ago to write a book about the Middle East, based on my personal observations as the Carter Center monitored three elections in Palestine and on my consultations with Israeli political leaders and peace activists. We covered every Palestinian community in 1996, 2005 and 2006, when Yasser Arafat and later Mahmoud Abbas were elected president and members of parliament were chosen. The elections were almost flawless, and turnout was very high — except in East Jerusalem, where, under severe Israeli restraints, only about 2% of registered voters managed to cast ballots. 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.

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  thanks to Antiwar.com

Jimmy Carter and the "A" Word
Will Other Democrats Listen to Carter on Palestine?

President Jimmy Carter's latest book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Simon and Schuster 2006), released yesterday, has been primed for controversy. Weeks before it hit the bookshelves, election-hungry Democrats were disavowing it because it used the word "apartheid" to describe the discrimination against Palestinians living in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. House Representative and soon-to-be Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi wrote: "It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously." But does the President's book really warrant the swift condemnation leveled against it by his own party? To put the name "apartheid" to Israeli policies is nothing new. Hendrik Verwoerd, South African Prime Minister and architect of apartheid did so in 1961. Israeli academic Uri Davis made the claim in 1987, as did Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu in 1989 and again in 2002. What makes Jimmy Carter unique is that he is the first U.S. President to make that comparison. Unlike the others, Carter's description is carefully qualified. He writes: "The driving purpose of the separation of the two peoples is unlike that in South Africa not racism but the acquisition of land" (189-190). What's more, Carter's assessment of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians contradicts the observations he catalogues in his own text. He writes that "There has been a determined and remarkably effective effort to isolate settlers from Palestinians, so that a Jewish family can commute from Jerusalem to their highly subsidized home deep in the West Bank on roads from which others are excluded, without ever coming in contact with any facet of Arab life" (190).

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Peace Not Apartheid
Jimmy Carter's Roadmap
by Norman Finkelstein

The historical chapters of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid are rather thin, filled with errors small and large, as well as tendentious and untenable interpretations. But few persons will be reading it for the history. It is what Carter has to say about the present that will interest the reading public and the media (assuming the book is not ignored). It can be said with certainty that Israel's apologists will not be pleased. Although Carter includes criticisms of the Palestinians to affect balance, it is clear that he holds Israel principally responsible for the impasse in the peace process. The most scathing criticisms of Israel come in Chapter 16 ("The Wall as a Prison"). One hopes that this chapter (and the concluding "Summary") will be widely disseminated. Below I reproduce some of Carter's key statements.

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Carter On Apartheid Israel

Jimmy Carter has out a book called "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid". It seems the book itself may contain some glaring errors, as the NJDC (who aren't reflexively hawkish on Israel) point out. However the bottom line that, as I understand it, Carter points out, is that as long as Israel has settlements in Palestinian turf, Israel is not serious about peace with the Palestinians. Nor will they get it. They signed the peace map, went back to Tel Aviv, and kept sending settlers in. Israel was never serious about the peace map. You'll notice that the attached graph from Haaretz shows no hiccup in the numbers in the 90's at all. I'm not pretending that the Palestinians are angels - most of their leaders are scum and they've done awful things and never lost an opportunity to lose an opportunity. But I also know what the casualty figure ratios are and I know who's suffering more from this. There is also the other argument about whether Israel is an apartheid state. I don't see how one can argue that it isn't, since about 40% of the population has effectively no rights of citizenship, no right to a trial, no right of free movement, and Palestine has spent decades having its land appropriated and cut into chunks (the idea that Israel doesn't rule the land is also a non starter when they kidnap members of the "Palestinian" government at will).

Apartheid Israel
A Beacon of Hope
By Virginia TilleyVirginia Tilley

And, just as apartheid did in southern Africa, Israel's fearful and zealous commitment to racial exclusion of the indigenous people is tearing the entire region apart. What do we get from recognizing this fact? We may take clues from public indications that Ariel Sharon before his stroke and Mr. Olmert after him have been terribly anxious that we not do so. For what can Israel do if it is truly held accountable for denying its territorial population the right to vote? How can it exclude its native people from equal citizenship if they ask for it? The common defence, the need to preserve Jewish statehood, will instantly ring hollow. For Israel styles itself a western-style democracy. Yet no western democracy is presently attacking its own territory's population with mortar barrages and helicopter gunships solely because of their ethnic identity. No western democracy is blasting whole families to bits with mortars solely because their ethnicity is unwelcome. No western democracy is now encircling millions of people within walled cantons solely on the basis of their religion or ethnicity. Like "White Australia" and apartheid South Africa before it, Israel is attempting to be racial state and a democratic state at the same time. No western democracy has survived the obvious contradictions of this formula: they all had to give it up. And apartheid Israel will not survive it if we call the shots as they are. Like the US, South Africa, New Zealand, and "White Australia" before it, Israel must admit its Muslim and Christian population as citizens and then grapple with the ensuing tough work of pluralist democracy like the rest of us. This was the hard-won South African solution, where the state now represents everybody. Seventeen languages and differing historical narratives are recognized and dignified. Whites have retained their property and wealth, while black Africans are rising rapidly to join the middle and upper classes. After some early economic missteps, the government has launched new social policies and steered booming trade with the African continent that are channelling wealth and rapid growth throughout the country. The press is free and vibrant. Is South Africa still struggling for racial equality and economic justice? Sure. Is it plagued by the racial legacy of settler colonialism? Sure. But ongoing struggles for equality and mutual respect are the human condition and the noble burden of democracy. South Africa is a vigorous, growing, vital society. And there is peace. John Dugard, the eminent South African legal scholar and UN Special Rapporteur on the Question of Palestine, wrote frankly in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that racial oppression in Israel is worse than it was in South Africa. But his assessment also offers hope. Identifying that we presently have a one-state solution - Israel's apartheid version - allows us to affirm a different one: a unified secular-democratic state, in which everyone is equal in dignity and rights, and where the Jewish and Palestinian national homes can share the land as they should. With that shared goal, disparate activist struggles around the world can find, at last, true direction.

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Elbow to elbow, like cattle
By Gideon Levy

Laila El-Haddad spent the last three weeks in a dismal apartment she was forced to rent in El Arish, Egypt, together with her son Yusuf, who is two years and nine months old. Every few days the two tried to travel to the Rafah border crossing, about 50 kilometers away, attempting to return to their home in Gaza. These were distressful efforts: Together with another 5,000 or so residents of Gaza, who have also been waiting in recent weeks to return to their homes, she was crammed with her toddler for hours in an endless line at the crossing. "Elbow to elbow, like cattle," is how she describes this in her blog, until being pushed back in shame once again. El-Haddad, a young journalist who splits her time between Gaza and the U.S., can afford to pay $9 per night. But most of the unfortunate people around her, including cancer patients, infants, the elderly and students, the injured and disabled, cannot allow themselves such luxuries. Some of them rent a tent for 1.5 Egyptian pounds per night. The rest simply sleep out in the open, in the chill of night, or crowd together in local mosques. These people want to return home. Israel does not even allow them this. They are human beings with families, plans and commitments, longings and dignity, but who cares. In recent weeks, even the Palestinian Minister of the Environment, Yusuf Abu Safiya, was stuck there. El-Haddad tells of how the minister could be seen one evening collecting twigs on the beach of El Arish to light a bonfire. During the summer, at least seven people died of heat and dehydration while waiting at the border. For many of those who are ill, the wait is a nightmare that threatens their lives. For students, it means losing an academic year. There is almost no mention of this cruel abuse in the newspapers: After all, the occupation in Gaza has ended.

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  thanks to Antiwar.com

Letter from James Abourezk, former US Senator from South Dakota to Jeff Blankfort on the Israel Lobby

I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear--fear of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell you that very few members of Congress--at least when I served there--have any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel. I've heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate will voice their bitter feelings about how they're pushed around by the Lobby to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby's animosity by making their feelings public.

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  thanks to Culture of Life News