The World According to Carter

By Alan Dershowitz
The New York Sun, November 22, 2006

Edited by Andy Ross

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid
By Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster, 288 pages

Sometimes you really can tell a book by its cover. Whatever Mr. Carter's motives may be, his authorship of this ahistorical, one-sided, and simplistic brief against Israel forever disqualifies him from playing any positive role in fairly resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. That is a tragedy because the Carter Center, which has done much good in the world, could have been a force for peace if Jimmy Carter were as generous in spirit to the Israelis as he is to the Palestinians.
 

AR  (2006) Sometimes you can tell a book by its review. Sadly, Carter has fallen into the moral trap that claims many devout Christians. He has let his tolerance of human weakness degrade his ability to tell right from wrong. The struggle between Israel and the Palestinians is not an example of the strong oppressing the weak, as if that were the salient fact of the matter, and it would not be well solved by a Solomonic splitting of the difference. The deeper truth is that Israel is right and the Palestinians are wrong. If leaders in the Middle East could rally enough vision, they would see that welcoming a flourishing Israel in their midst and resettling Palestinians elsewhere with oil revenues instead of buying weapons was the royal road to peace and progress in the region beyond all previous imagining. Both the Indians and Chinese accepted a British presence in their midst during the years of the British Empire and are profiting from it now as they find their place in world markets. In the same way, Arabs can profit from a Jewish presence. All they have to do first is turn away from the anachronistic monstrosity they cultivate as Islamic militancy. Carter should have had the sense to see this and fight for the truth instead of trying to cuddle up to a snake like Yassir Arafat. Returning to the book, Alan Dershowitz has done us a great service in briefly explaining why we need not waste our time on Carter's evidently shoddy effort.