Jimmy Carter and Apartheid

The title says it all, doesn't it? Jimmy Carter raised another stir by trying to equate Israel's occupation of the Palestinian Territories (40 years of occupation) with South Africa's former apartheid policies. Now, I've yet to read the book, and with my reading list getting longer anyway, it's possible I'll never read it. But in many ways the book itself is unimportant. What is important is the unending debacle that is the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. We could go on forever debating the merits of Carter's charges, but the reality is that no one, not the Israelis, not the Americans, not the Palestinians, not the surrounding Arab nations are really intent on resolving this problem. In fact things seem to only get worse, not better.

Joseph Lelyveld has written a lengthy review essay for the New York Review of Books of Carter's book together with Jeffrey Goldberg's Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide. Lelyveld does an excellent job of laying out the issues and notes that in many ways Carter misses the true similarities between South Africa's policy and that of Israel. It was in South Africa and is in Israel an issue of land -- for the racial issues are very different. The Settlements are the crux of the problem, and their expansion and protection an support and linkages all make a realistic two-state settlement more and more difficult.

Where as Carter defines apartheid in terms of "forced segregation," such an identification may have more to do with Carter's own Dixie upbringing than the facts on the ground. Lelyveld writes that the real issue here is control, "which was the point of the settlements in the first place, for both the military strategists and the ideologues who backed the movement." Indeed, now the question is, can a two-state solution have "room for a Palestinian state that will have any sovereignty worthy of the name. The settlements have long since become the 'facts on the ground' they were always meant to be and, therefore, the main obstacles to the 'peace' Carter ardently hopes to see."

In conclusion the reviewer writes:

Of these two books, there's no question about which one is deeper, truer. But it's only the thinner, weaker one, by the old political actor taking one of his last bows, that presumes to answer the question of what's to be done. Above all, it's a political statement, a political act. In a tough review of Carter's book in The Washington Post, Jeffrey Goldberg takes no real issue with the former president on the central issue of the Jewish settlements. "Many Palestinians, and many Israelis, have died on the altar of settlement," he writes. For him this is "a tragedy, of course." If Carter in his use of "apartheid" is too judgmental in the view of his critics, maybe "tragedy" is not judgmental enough, seeming to suggest, as it does, that the settlements were not the result of deliberate and stealthy planning but simply good intentions gone wrong.

As a journalist, Goldberg doesn't take it on himself to answer Carter's challenge. He seems inclined to think the answer has to come from the Palestinians. Twice in his book he wonders aloud about why they haven't faced the occupation with the Gandhian tactic of nonviolent resistance. Gandhians have hardly been conspicuous in the Israeli leadership, but on the level of tactics it's a good question; nonviolence could hardly have accomplished less for the Palestinians than suicide bombing. It's also a reminder of the downward spiral that sets in when two sides come to recognize only the other's darkest impulses, each saying that the other understands only one language, the language of violence. That's what South Africans, black and white, used to say of each other; it's what many Israelis and Palestinians have told themselves for years.

Jimmy Carter says the Americans have to intervene. Jeffrey Goldberg wants the Palestinians to renounce violence. Maybe that means that if anything positive is going to happen, it's up to the Israelis to make the next move, if only to demonstrate that they're not permanently trapped in their old security doctrines and failed dreams of dominance (or those of a waning administration in Washington). Anwar Sadat and Yitzak Rabin, each in his own time, showed that the situation can be changed by an imaginative leap; each then paid with his life. Now each side says there's no negotiating partner; and each side has proven to be right, so far.

So, who will make the first move? At least for now the US is incapable of exerting any influence. There really isn't any resolve to push the Israelis and we're so hung up in Iraq and dependent on Saudi oil, we're not in a position to push the Arab communities, and we have no clout with the Palestinians. The Palestinians have no power and little social cohesiveness left after a half-century of exile. So, maybe it's true, the Israelis must take the initiative to bring this to a close, because as the reviewer points out, if there is any similarity to the South African situation, the former policies finally proved unsustainable. Let us pray for peace.