Jimmy Carter, anti-Jew

by Lee Green

Jimmy Carter Distorts Facts, Demonizes Israel in Book

Former President Jimmy Carter has written an egregiously biased book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and is currently doing numerous interviews to sell the book and its ideas. Carter is attempting to rewrite history, and in his alternate universe, Arabs parties are blameless and Israel is at fault for almost all the conflicts in the world. One gets the feeling after reading just a few pages that if he could have blamed Hurricane Katrina on Israel, he would have. His main messages are that Israel is badly mistreating the Palestinians and that the cause of the conflict is Israel's refusal to return to what he calls its "legal borders" (sic), the pre-67 armistice lines.

Because the Palestinian Arabs have been offered a viable state of their own numerous times, including with the same borders that Carter desires, but turned it down since it meant recognizing Israel's legitimacy and permanence and ending the conflict, Carter either ignores or mischaracterizes the offers. He never lets the facts get in the way of his "must blame Israel" theories. In Carter's twisted universe, it is the Arabs who have always been eager for peace, with Israel opposing it at every turn.

Almost every page of Carter's book contains errors, distortions or glaring omissions. The following list is just a small portion of the many problems in the book:

• Carter claims Israel has been the primary obstacle to peace, that Arab leaders have long sought peace while Israel preferred holding on to "Palestinian land" over peace, and that if only Israel would "[withdraw] to the 1967 border as specified in the U.N. Resolution 242...", there would be peace.

Aside from his obviously questionable opinions, Carter is factually wrong when he asserts that U.N. Resolution 242 requires Israel to withdraw to the 1949 armistice line that was in place until 1967. He has repeated this serious falsehood in many interviews, such as on the November 28 PBS NewsHour:

"The demand is for them to give back all the land. The United Nations resolutions that apply, the agreements that have been made at Camp David under me and later at Oslo for which the Israeli leaders received the Nobel Peace Prizes, was [sic] based on Israel's withdrawal from occupied territories."

He mischaracterizes UN resolutions and apparently has forgotten what he himself signed as a witness to the 1978 Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt, which states in Section A1c: "The negotiations [concerning the West Bank and Gaza] shall be based on all the provisions and principles of UN Security Council Resolution 242. The negotiations will resolve, among other matters, the location of the boundaries and the nature of the security arrangements."

To claim now that the very agreement he witnessed and signed specifies withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines is outrageous. [While the 1979 Camp David document again mentions UN Resolution 242, it makes no further mention of the West Bank or Gaza Strip. It instead deals with Israeli-Egyptian relations, and includes a map of the Israel-Egypt International Boundary (Annex II). Tellingly, no maps demarcating any boundary between Israel and the Palestinians are appended to the Camp David documents, Resolution 242, the Oslo Accords, or the "road map".]

UN Resolution 242 does not require Israel to withdraw from all the land to the "1967 border", since there is no such border. The "green line" is merely the 1949 armistice line and the drafters of 242 explicitly stated that this line was not a "secure border" -- which 242 calls for.

The British UN Ambassador at the time, Lord Caradon, who introduced the resolution to the Council, has stated that, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial."

The American UN Ambassador at the time, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, has stated that, "The notable omissions - which were not accidental - in regard to withdrawal are the words 'the' or 'all' and the 'June 5, 1967 lines' ... the resolution speaks of withdrawal from occupied territories without defining the extent of withdrawal." This would encompass "less than a complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from occupied territory, inasmuch as Israel's prior frontiers had proved to be notably insecure."

The reasoning of the United States and its allies at the time was clear: Any resolution which, in the face of the aggressive war launched in 1967 against Israel, required complete Israeli withdrawal, would have been seen as a reward for aggression and an invitation to future aggression. This is assuredly not what the UN voted for, or had in mind, when it passed Resolution 242.

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