A professional journal asked me to review Jimmy Carter's Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. A Palestinian student, on the occasion of a party to celebrate the completion of his masters thesis, gave me a copy of Nakba: Palestine 1948 and the Claims of Memory, edited by Ahmad H. Sa'di and Lila Abu-Lughod.
I read them both, with a mounting sense of discomfort. It does not bother me so much that both books portray Israeli contributions to Palestinian misery. We live amidst intense dispute. Defense and preemption are violent. Not every action of a uniformed Israeli would stand a test of morality. History is sufficiently knotted with attack, counter attack, deception, and personal tragedy to hinder any simplistic assertion of who started it, and what was more or less justified.
What bothers me in both books are themes of Palestinian self-pity, and an almost complete lack of willingness to accept any responsibility for their misery. The product is self-destructive. The Palestinian narrative, which Carter adopts and reinforces, works against any compromise or concession that can end the bloodshed.
Carter is not entirely one sided. Several times he notes that a continued lack of peace stems from the failure of Palestinians and other Arabs to recognize Israel's right to exist, and their violence against its civilians. Critics of Carter's book should recall that his pressure at Camp David in 1978 produced a peace treaty with Egypt. It ranks as one of the best services of an American president for Israel. Israelis, Egyptians, and Carter are unhappy with the follow-up to that accord. Nonetheless, it has held, and brought significant benefits to both Israel and Egypt.
Carter joins the Palestinian cause by putting the greater blame for continued problems on Israel's intransigence. He writes that it has not negotiated in good faith; it is intent on seizing Palestinian land for the sake of Jewish settlers in violation of international accords that it has accepted; and it is walling off segments of Palestinian territory from one another in a way to make the functioning of a viable state impossible.
The basic flaw of Carter's book, justifying the label of dishonesty, is its title. "Apartheid" is a loaded word, associated with the widely condemned racist regime of South Africa. In the book, and in numerous presentations, Carter has indicated that Israel itself is not an apartheid society. I see the term denied whenever I meet with one of my Arab students, chat with an Arab friend in the gym, or when I hear of yet another Arab family moving into our largely Jewish neighborhood and sending its children to the Hebrew-language primary school.
Carter emphasizes that apartheid is in Gaza and the West Bank: closed and separated, and with areas of the West Bank cut off from one another with Israel's barriers of fences and walls along with numerous checkpoints on the roads. He sees the barriers as violations of international law, and as assurance that Palestinian animosity will continue to fuel violence. Here and there he agrees that Israel has a right of self defense, but only if it built the barriers on the international border or within its own territory. Sometimes even this would violate his norms, insofar as it would prevent Palestinians from working, receiving social services, or visiting religious sites in Israel.
What most seems to arouse Carter is the barriers' protection of the settlements built for Jews on Palestinian land, and the roads which only Israelis are permitted to use.
There are several problems in the distinctions Carter would like us to accept. First, the prominence of apartheid in the title overcomes his efforts to refine his accusation. Secondly, the concept of apartheid, and the principal feature of its ugliness, is racism. However, Israel's barriers are not racist but territorial. They are not directed against Arabs. but against Palestinians who are not residents of Israel. Arabs circulate freely within Israel, calling themselves "Israeli Arabs" or "Palestinians living in Israel." Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank have been violent. More than 80 percent of them polled by Palestinian organizations have expressed support for the violence against Israeli civilians. Just as any country can set itself off from danger and enter other countries in actions that are basically defensive, Israel can claim a right to construct barriers in order to protect its citizens from a continuation of the violence that has killed more than 1,000 of them--the great majority civilians--from 2000 onward. Against Carter's claim of Israel's intransigence is the record that Israel made what was arguably a generous proposal. Yassir Arafat rejected it, and moved to the incitement and management of violence.
In short, Carter is throwing at Israel one of the dirtiest words he can find, yet it does not fit the situation, even after his bending and twisting to justify its use.
Carter's rhetoric about the barriers being built on Palestinian land also deserves comment. It falls afoul of the problematic border between Israel and what is called the West Bank. A reasonable view is that the land is disputed; not clearly Israeli or Palestinian. If the barriers come to define the border, the responsibility will be at least partly a product of Palestinian rejectionism and violence. The barriers are part of a war that continues.
The Berlin Wall came down. Israel is inserting numerous border crossings into the barriers. Israel's Supreme Court has halted the construction of sections, or demanded their dismantling, when convinced that damage to Palestinian interests outweigh the security arguments. How often the gates will be open, how thorough the inspections of Palestinians wanting to cross, and how long the barriers remain, will depend on Israel's conception of a threat from Palestinian violence.
Nakba (catastrophe) continues the theme of Israeli injustices, with barely a hint of what the Palestinians contributed to their problems. Rape is prominent in the book, serving as an parallel to Carter's ugly word of apartheid. Contributors cite Israeli sources for a dozen or so cases rape during and after the 1948 war, and assert that there were more. They also write about rape as a metaphor, which includes Israeli property development, typically described as ugly, said to be the rape of Palestinian land.
In November, 2001, I heard an American of Palestinian origin talking on the BBC about a radio play dealing with the raping of Palestinian women in Israeli jails. I learned that an Israeli-Palestinian civil rights organization had investigated a number of charges, and found nothing to support them. BBC broadcast the story without question, as if rapes of Palestinian women were a regular occurrence in Israeli jails
Several contributors to the Nakba anthology discuss what they call the massacre of Jenin in 2002. The Palestinian narrative is that the IDF killed 3,000 civilians. Human Rights Watch, usually unfriendly to Israel, put the death toll of Palestinians at 31 fighters and 22 civilians. Twenty-three Israeli soldiers died in the same operation.
Jenin, like the larger story of Palestinian Nakba, did not occur in a vacuum. The Palestinian flights or expulsions in 1948 were part of a war in which Palestinian fighters were active, and in which some 6,000 Israelis lost their lives. The attack on Jenin came as part of Israel's response to an especially ugly suicide bombing at a Passover Seder that killed 30 celebrants and injured 140.
A key element in the Palestinian narrative is the notion of refugee camps. The term appears throughout Nakba. The implication is something temporary, like tents whose residents are waiting to return home. The reality is poor urban neighborhoods, with substantial dwellings that have provided shelter for several generations. Dependence comes with the food and social services provided by United Nations and other organizations, which themselves live off the notion of refugees who somehow cannot settle themselves into anything like a permanent existence of self-sufficiency.
Misery occurs to Israelis and to Palestinians. It will continue as long as the Palestinian narrative emphasizes the land that was lost, and which must be returned. Change happens. People move. One can no more identify the "original inhabitants" of Palestine than those of Germany, Great Britain, or the United States. People who live in the past limit their opportunities for the present and the future. It does not help when they obsess on tendentious claims of injustice, like Jimmy Carter's assertion of apartheid, or the Palestinians' rape of history.