“You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste,” the new White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has said, exuberantly defining the economic meltdown as an opportunity for grand new domestic policies. The war in Gaza raises the question of whether Emanuel’s boss will apply the same approach overseas. Will President Obama regard the latest Israeli-Palestinian bleeding as a symptom of an untreatable chronic disease, or as an acute crisis that proves the need for a dramatic American diplomatic initiative?
Jimmy Carter’s advice on answering that question is clear from his title, even if he dashed this book off before the most recent war. In fact, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” is really a short op-ed article disguised as a book. The argument, which might easily have been put in 900 words, is that Obama should follow Carter’s own example, defy political calculations and throw himself into Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
Jimmy Carter’s advice on answering that question is clear from his title, even if he dashed this book off before the most recent war. In fact, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” is really a short op-ed article disguised as a book. The argument, which might easily have been put in 900 words, is that Obama should follow Carter’s own example, defy political calculations and throw himself into Arab-Israeli peacemaking.
The goal, Carter says, should be reaching a two-state solution, with the borders between Israel and the Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 armistice lines, along with minor territorial exchanges. Obama should get to work at the start of his term, put his own peace proposals on the table and persuade both parties to accept them. Carter implies that Obama must separate support for Israel from support for Israel’s policies. In short, he should do what Carter says he did to bring peace between Israel and Egypt.
Achieving peace, Carter argues, also requires reversing two elements of George W. Bush’s policy: his coldness toward negotiations between Israel and Syria, and his effort to isolate Hamas. Again, he presents himself as a model for Obama, since he met with the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, and with Hamas leaders during his Middle East tour last year. Carter describes, albeit altogether too briefly, Hamas’s terror campaign against Israeli civilians. (In general, he has an easier time talking about Israeli obstacles to peace than Palestinian ones.) But without Hamas’s involvement, he argues, there will be no agreement. And with no agreement in sight, even moderate Palestinians are beginning to consider the one-state alternative: demanding full political rights in Israel, which would lose its Jewish majority and become a binational state.
Carter’s counsel lacks a couple of critical elements. Nonetheless, it has much to recommend it. The Gaza crisis is a reminder, as if another were needed, that ignoring this conflict is equivalent to waiting for it to explode again, with shock waves felt across the entire region. While a peace initiative may look risky, it might actually be the most prudent course the new administration could pursue.
Unfortunately, Carter’s book reads as if it had first been spoken into a recorder for a couple of weeks, with the author working mainly from memory and his diary. Much of “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” is a listing of events, usually meetings held by Carter with important people. It’s strange that a former president of the United States feels such a need to name-drop.
A beginning student of the Middle East should not learn diplomatic history from this text. In Carter’s telling, the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat went to Jerusalem at his prodding. More objective accounts portray Sadat as making an end run around Carter’s stubborn intent to reconvene the Geneva peace conference.
Yet it was Carter who convinced Sadat that he would have to recognize Israel to get the Sinai back. And at Camp David in 1978, Carter succeeded in reaching the goal that eluded Bill Clinton at Camp David 22 years later — cajoling an Israeli and an Arab leader to make peace. This required deep American involvement, driven by the president. The curious thing about Carter’s history is that he can be wrong on the details and right about the conclusions.
The agreement with Egypt arguably improved Israel’s security as much as any other single event in its history. Yet a portion of American Jewry has never forgiven Carter for his success. This hints at a key lacuna in Carter’s agenda: though he got into the peacemaking business as a politician, he gives too little attention to the need for building political support for a diplomatic initiative — among voters at home as much as among Israelis and Palestinians.
Indirectly, Carter’s title also hints at a second lacuna. Looking for a neutral name for the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, he chooses “Holy Land,” a phrase from Christian tradition. Carter’s perspective is explicitly religious. Though that can irritate secular observers, it has served him well. His faith helped him build personal connections both to Sadat and to the Israeli leader Menachem Begin, despite Begin’s intransigence. Yet when he finally presents his outline of a peace agreement here, he makes no new, creative proposal for the future of the holy place claimed by Jews as the Temple Mount and by Muslims as Haram al-Sharif. Given Carter’s sensitivity to religious issues, this is surprising and disappointing.
Then again, an op-ed article can’t answer every question, even an article stretched as long as this one. Not accidentally, the publication date for “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” was Jan. 20. Its most important intended reader should take seriously Carter’s advice to pursue peace, while applying his own considerably greater skills to building a constituency for that effort."
WE CAN HAVE PEACE IN THE HOLY LAND
A Plan That Will Work
By Jimmy Carter
Illustrated. 228 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27
