A businessman called Steve Berman, from Jimmy Carter’s home state of Georgia, wrote a moving piece last year in the Jewish-American magazine Forward.
Sixteen years earlier, Berman had been the leader of 15 board members who had resigned in protest from the Carter Centre, the international NGO that the US president had formed after leaving office. Like many other Jewish-Americans, Berman had been infuriated by Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, and he was far from convinced by Carter’s explanation that, while he was not saying that Israel was already an apartheid state, it was moving in that direction because of its occupation of Palestinian territory.
In his article, Berman, a visitor to Israel since childhood, described how, over subsequent years, he had begun to see that Carter was likely to have been “right”. So much so that, in 2015, he wrote Carter a personal apology over the resignation, saying that he had now concluded that while the occupation had begun “by accident” after the Six Day War of 1967, it was now becoming “an enterprise with colonial intentions”.
Berman had always been relatively liberal, but his story still illustrates the extent to which Carter was ahead of his time, using language about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians that was far less common then than it is now.
Carter was in fact never “anti-Israel”, as he was routinely described by critics of his book. Instead, he became one of the global champions of a solution in which Israel could live in security side by side with a Palestinian state.
After all, his greatest foreign policy achievement was his mediation which secured the ground-breaking, historic and still surviving Egypt-Israel treaty in 1979, which in Berman’s own words had “spared thousands of lives on the Israeli-Egyptian border” and saved “hundreds of billions of dollars in military costs”.
At one point during the Camp David summit which preceded the treaty signing, Carter took both delegations to Gettysburg to underline the lessons of the American Civil War and the dangers of not making peace.
Carter had wanted to do more, of course, by securing a lasting solution to the core Middle East conflict. But unlike the many other US presidents who had failed to do that in office, Carter devoted himself in retirement – beside his pursuit of many other causes like the reduction of famine and disease in Africa – to finding the just peace between Israelis and Palestinians that looks so distant today.
Nor did Carter shy away from what seemed the most intractable problems of the conflict. In 2009 I was in Gaza, where my friend Sami Abdel-Shafi was the Carter Centre’s representative, when Carter became, at the age of 84, easily the highest profile Western figure to meet Hamas leaders, despite the two-year-old international boycott.
Carter was characteristically robust in calling for an end to the Israel-Egypt blockade, which he described as treating Gaza’s inhabitants as “more like animals than human beings” and condemning the recent military offensive in Gaza, as well as the firing of rockets by militants from the Strip.
The year Iran was defanged - and the effect it will have on the world
Read MoreBut his three hours of talks with senior Hamas officials, including Ismail Haniyeh, then its leader in Gaza but assassinated by Israel this year, were devoted to trying to tease out potential common ground between Hamas and the international community, including a concerted effort to persuade Hamas to accept the three conditions for ending the boycott: recognition of Israel, renunciation of violence, and accepting previous agreements, including the Oslo accords.
Hamas had indicated that it would accept a Palestinian state on 1967 borders if it was backed in a referendum, and this was a high point for the more political elements in Hamas seeking international recognition.
Had the Carter initiative been more energetically followed up by Western governments, it’s just possible that Hamas leadership would not have much later passed to a more militarist tendency; its October 2023 attack on Israel and the devastating retaliation by Israel still going on after 14 months might not have happened.
Carter remained highly critical of Israel’s present prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for having “no intention at all for a two-state solution”. And he was scathing about Donald Trump’s plan in his first term for a “Deal of the Century”, saying he saw little or no hope of it bringing “justice for the Palestinians”.
But he said in 2006 he was as invested in Israel’s security as his critics, saying that “the greatest commitment in my life has been trying to bring peace to Israel” – a peace which he believed would follow an end to occupation.
Meanwhile, within a week of his own 2015 letter to Carter, Steve Berman received a handwritten note from the ex-president saying he had no need to apologise. His Forward article was headlined: “I was wrong about Israel. I apologised. Then President Carter gave me a lesson in grace.”
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Jimmy Carter was right about Israel )
Also on site :
- Final Palisades fire evacuation order lifted
- 'Unprecedented' number of US Air Force aerial refueling tankers heading toward Europe
- Walmart Is Selling a ‘Lightweight’ $116 Cordless Vacuum for Just $60, and Shoppers Say It’s 'Easy to Move and Carry'