Middle Eastern Politics - Essay Example

Assessor Unit: Place: Middle Eastern Politics Book Review Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2006, pp. 288, Price: $ 14.85. This is a momentous book. It has created a furor and a digression at a time when Republican President George Bush Jr. is being grilled from all sides anent his military rendezvous in Iraq in the aftermath of terrorists' attack on the New York Trade Center and Pentagon. Former President Jimmy Carter and a Democrats' leader is a mature political person. He could not have come out with this book at this crucial time without any calculate reason. Carter has invited plethora of criticism not only against him but also his Democratic party. This is a time for Presidential election-2008. Democratic candidates like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican candidates like Rudy Giuliani and other prominent leaders are in the fray. The general public and political fury against the Republicans concerning United States' military involvement has digressed to a great extent towards the Democrats especially after publication of Carter's book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid. In this sense, his workmanship as an author is benefiting opponents of Democrats!!! How it is happening It is anybody's guess. This is a catch 22 situation. Carter is becoming the cause of "making a mountain of a mole". Democrats are being sandwiched real hard from top to bottom and vice versa like butter and ham between two slices of bread. Why Carter's book sees the light of day at this juncture Maybe just to go for a digression and attract voters attention towards Democrats because otherwise Republicans were being seen falling pray to wider criticism from masses and media about their Iraq policy. One wonders whether this trick can really serve its purpose in the ultimate analysis - giving a boost to the popularity of the Democrats in Presidential elections. This is a very high risk proposition. Indeed, stakes are also very high and heavy. Carter has made his Damocles' sword hang on Israelis and Jews inasmuch as he has branded them agents of direct policy of Apartheid against Palestine people and land. The powerful Jew community of United States (US) from within and without has started aiming at the Democrats in the form of a planned campaign. It is because Carter's book points nearly throughout its chapters that Israelis are violators of human rights and world peace: Gaza has maintained a population growth rate of 4.7 percent annually, one of the highest in the world, so more than half its people are less than fifteen years old. They are being strangled since the Israeli "withdrawal," surrounded by a separation barrier that is penetrated only by Israeli-controlled checkpoints, with just a single opening (for personnel only) into Egypt's Sinai as their access to the outside world. There have been no moves by Israel to permit transportation by sea or by air. Fishermen are not permitted to leave the harbor, workers are prevented from going to outside jobs, the import or export of food and other goods is severely restricted and often cut off completely, and the police, teachers, nurses, and social workers are deprived of salaries. Per capita income has decreased 40 percent during the last three years, and the poverty rate has reached 70 percent. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food has stated that acute malnutrition in Gaza is already on the same scale as that seen in the poorer countries of the Southern Sahara, with more than half of Palestinian families eating only one meal a day. (Carter 176). Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian author supports Carter while reviewing his latest book. He writes: The 39th president of the United States, the most successful Arab-Israeli peace negotiator to date, has braved a storm of criticism, including the insinuation from the pro-Israel Anti-Defamation League that his arguments are anti-Semitic. Mr. Carter has tried to mollify critics by suggesting that his is not a commentary on Israeli policy inside Israel's own borders, as compared with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem -- territories Israel occupied in 1967. He told NPR, "I know that Israel is a wonderful democracy with equal treatment of all citizens whether Arab or Jew. And so I very carefully avoided talking about anything inside Israel. Given the pressure he has faced, it may be understandable that Mr. Carter says this, but he is wrong. In addition to nearly four million Palestinians living under Israeli rule in the occupied territories, another one million live inside Israel's pre-1967 borders. These Palestinians are descendants of those who were not forced out or did not flee when Israel was created in 1948. They have nominal Israeli citizenship, and unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa, they do vote for the country's parliament. Yet this is where any sense of equality ends. In Israel's history, no Arab-led party has ever been asked to join a coalition government. And, among scores of Jewish ministers, there has only ever been one Arab minister, of junior rank. Discrimination against non-Jewish citizens both informal and legalized is systematic. Non-Jewish children attend separate schools and live in areas that receive a fraction of the funding of their Jewish counterparts. The results can be seen in the much poorer educational attainment, economic, health and life outcomes of Palestinian citizens of Israel. Much of the land of the country, controlled by the quasi-governmental Jewish National Fund, cannot be leased or sold to non-Jews. This is similar in effect to the restrictive covenants that in many U.S. cities once kept nonwhites out of certain neighborhoods. A 2003 law stipulates that an Israeli citizen may bring a non-citizen spouse to live in Israel from anywhere in the world, excluding a Palestinian from the occupied territories. A civil rights leader in Israel likened it to the American anti-miscegenation measures from the 1950s, when mixed race couples had to leave the state of Virginia to marry legally (Abunimah, Editorial). Jimmy Carter comes down quite mercilessly on Israel especially in Chapter 16 of his book. Apparently, for Carter, Israelis are never ready to listen to opinions that are even slightly against them. Carter further points out in his book: In April 2003 a "Roadmap" for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was announced by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on behalf of the United States, the United Nations, Russia, and the European Union (known as the Quartet).The Palestinians accepted the road map in its entirety but the Israeli government announced fourteen caveats and prerequisites, some of which would preclude any final peace talks. (Carter 159). All such writings on the part of Carter are inviting vehement criticism for the Jew community in particular. The Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC) is widely distributing and publishing ads against Democrats on a very professional and large scale: A few examples of such ads are being reproduced here: (RJC, 17 October 2006) What effect Carter's book will have on Presidential elections Answer lies only with posterity to see. These are clearly issues of "politicking" and prospective and current tides and trends of the election scenario. There are also certain things beyond this electoral arena. These relate to whether Carter's assertions in his latest, as it were, magnum opus are right and factually and historically correct. This must also be seen analytically. United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCRs), as mentioned by Carter also, will prove to be most authentic if they are resorted to without any "interpretation". Here UNSCR 242 is of real significance (UNSCR 242, 1967 http://www.un.org/documents/sc/res/1967/scres67.htm ). This resolution concerns Israel - Palestine context. This area of international politics has always been of great interest to Carter. He regards Arab - Israeli conflict as: among Washington's most important foreign policy topics, he has written more than two dozen articles and commentaries about the conflict, eight in the past year alone. In these publications, Carter uses his credibility as a former president, Nobel laureate and key player in the September 1978 Camp David accords and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty to unfold his set of truths and often to criticize U.S. policy.. Carter's twenty-first book and his second to focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, is deficient. He does what no non-fiction author should ever do: He allows ideology or opinion to get in the way of facts. While Carter says that he wrote the book to educate and provoke debate, the narrative aims its attack toward Israel, Israeli politicians, and Israel's supporters. It contains egregious errors of both commission and omission. To suit his desired ends, he manipulates information, redefines facts, and exaggerates conclusions. Falsehoods, when repeated and backed by the prestige of Carter's credentials, can comprise an erroneous baseline for shaping and reinforcing attitudes and policymaking. Rather than bring peace, they can further fuel hostilities, encourage retrenchment, and hamper peacemaking (Stein MEQ). Carters' book has several weaknesses. There are no footnotes and proper stylistic references. Maybe because he considers himself to be an authority in the area of Middle East. Despite being an expert in this area, he is also, perhaps unintentionally, distorting facts and history and established records. It contains an appendix and a series of maps, some of which he seems to have mislabeled and taken from Clinton-era negotiator Dennis Ross' The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace (Ross Appendix). Moreover, there is no discussion and analysis of terrorism and activities of Ossama Bin Laden in this book! As regards withdrawal of Israeli forces, Carter is misrepresenting the UNSCR 242. UNSCR 242 and 338 remain the resolutions around which diplomats center efforts to negotiate a settlement. In its preamble, UNSCR 242 notes "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war" and, in its operative portion, calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict." Nowhere in the resolution does it stipulate what or where Israel's borders should be, nor does the resolution mandate Israeli withdrawal from all [, as suggested by Carter,] territories taken in the 1967 war. This is not a parsing of an arbitrary phrase; it took five months to negotiate and endorse the intentional ambiguity embodied in the language of the resolution [Yet, Carter says that UNSCR require Israel to withdraw from all Palestinian land] Carter revises UNSCR 242, though, saying it "confirmed Israel's existence within its 1949 borders as promised in the Camp David Accords and Oslo Agreement" and that it states "Israel must withdraw from occupied territories. Later, he writes that UNSCR 242 "mandates" and "requires" Israeli withdrawal (Carter 38, 207, 208; UNSCR-242; Stein MEQ). Former President Carter is, indeed, committing a lot many blunders in this book. Despite this, it appears, his main intention is primarily human and humanitarian. In this cause, he has gone beyond the limits of factual, historical and political exactitude. Is he trying to go beyond time and space for filling this humanitarian purpose He is right when he points out that Israel has settled on a land belonging to Palestine. But this type of humanitarian analysis shows growing age of Jimmy Carter for earlier in his days during his White House sojourn, he was not so forgetful about facts and history. Among several other anomalies, one of the biggest one is, as pointed out earlier also in this review, near complete absence of terrorism and its relation to the Middle East and Palestine. In the book, Carter does not mention the counterproductive judgments made by Palestinian leaders or their embrace of terrorism over the last many years. While nineteenth- and twentieth-century European, Ottoman, Arab, and Zionist leaders all sought at various times to stifle Palestinian self-determination, the claim that the establishment of a Palestinian state rests only in the hands of Jerusalem and Washington is rubbish. By adopting so completely the Palestinian historical narrative, Carter may hamper diplomatic efforts enshrined in the "Road Map" and elsewhere that attempt to compel the Palestinian leadership to accept accountability for its actions. In pursuing this path, Carter violates the advice he gave eighty Palestinian business, religious, and political leaders on March 16, 1983, when, speaking to a gathering at the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, he said, "Unless you take your own destiny into your own hands and stop relying on others," you will not have a state (Stein MEQ). But one thing, in spite of all inaccuracies in Carter's book, this book is going to be read by almost every educated and politically alert person. This by itself is a very creditable aspect of a writer's work. It goes well with accomplished authors like Jimmy Carters and others. References Abunimah, Ali. (2006). "A Palestinian View of Jimmy Carter's Book", The Wall Street Journal, 26 December. Editorial. Carter, Jimmy. (2006). Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, Simon & Schuster, New York. Jewish Coalition, Republican. (RJC) Ads against Democrats, http://www.forward.com , 17 October 2006. Ross, Dennis (2004). The Missing Peace: The Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Stein, Kenneth W. (2007), Middle East Quarterly. Spring. UNSCR 242, (1967). http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/240/94/IMG/NR024094.pdfOpenElement see also http://www.un.org/documents/sc/res/1967/scres67.htm Text of SC Resolution 242 is reproduced fro above mentioned sources: The Security Council; Expressing its continuing concern with the grave situation in the Middle East, Emphasizing the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war and the need to work for a just and lasting peace in which every State in the area can live in security, Emphasizing further that all Member States in their acceptance of the Charter of the United Nations have undertaken a commitment to act in accordance with Article 2 of the Charter, 1. Affirms that the fulfillment of Charter principles requires the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East which should include the application of both the following principles: (i) Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; (ii)Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force; 2. Affirms further the necessity (a) For guaranteeing freedom of navigation through international waterways in the area; (b) For achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem; (c) For guaranteeing the territorial inviolability and political independence of every State in the area, through measures including the establishment of demilitarized zones; 3. Requests the Secretary General to designate a Special Representative to proceed to the Middle East to establish and maintain contacts with the States concerned in order to promote agreement and assist efforts to achieve a peaceful and accepted settlement in accordance with the provisions and principles in this resolution; 4. Requests the Secretary-General to report to the Security Council on the progress of the efforts of the Special Representative as soon as possible. Read More