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- cross-posted to:
- aiop
- [email protected]
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The title was Jimmy Carter’s idea. Peace talks were nonexistent, Israel showed no sign of ending its control over the lives of millions of Palestinians, and the United States was not doing anything to stop it. Carter wanted to be provocative. He succeeded.
The well-organized backlash to Carter’s 2006 book was captured by an ad in the New York Times from the Anti-Defamation League that declared: “There’s only one honest thing about President Carter’s new book. The criticism.” Included below were denunciations from Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and DNC Chairman Howard Dean. Carter, who’d brought together Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978 and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, said he was being called a bigot and an antisemite for the first time in his life.
Carter saw where Israel was headed with its refusal to countenance Palestinian statehood, and correctly warned it would end tragically for both sides. In response, the American mainstream treated him as a crank at best and an antisemite at worst. With Palestinians now suffering the worst violence in their history, which Amnesty International recently concluded constitutes genocide, it is more important than ever to recognize the truth of Carter’s claim that peace would only come when Israel—likely under pressure from the United States—abandoned its efforts to deprive Palestinians of sovereignty in their homeland.
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Jimmy Carter was a fantastic president anyone who thinks otherwise is likely why we’re in this current situation, of any situation from Gaza to Trump to climate change
He wasn’t a fantastic president, he came to most of these realization afterwards.
Hindsight Carter was a horrible president. His lip service after descending the throne won’t fix his deeds while on it.
Jimmy Carter was ignored about pretty much everything and he was right virtually every time.
With Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, he tried to prevent the tragedy he saw coming. “It is obvious that the Palestinians will be left with no territory in which to establish a viable state,” Carter wrote. “The Palestinians will have a future impossible for them or any responsible portion of the international community to accept, and Israel’s permanent status will be increasingly troubled and uncertain as deprived people fight oppression.”
In the next paragraph, Carter offered a now unsettling warning about what form that violent resistance might take. He explained that Palestinian and Lebanese militants knew the value of a captured Israeli soldier or civilian. As a result, absent an Israeli commitment to peace, militants would have an incentive to obtain hostages. Israel would then respond with overwhelming and disproportionate force. But it likely wouldn’t be enough to destroy the hostage takers, Carter warned. After the bombs stopped falling, they would emerge more popular than ever.
That’s a crystal ball level prediction. Spot on, unfortunately.
I don’t think that counts as a crystal ball moment, everyone already knew for years and years. It’s like if I predicted, right now, that climate change will get worse unless things change dramatically.
I don’t know that “everyone knew” about the hostage-taking idea for years and years. I know I sure didn’t, and a lot of people seemed very shocked when it happened.
I think you would have to be pretty deep into the whole situation to think that was a scenario worth writing about.
I also think you are really downplaying the depth of knowledge and experience that Jimmy Carter had.
This. Considering he made the prediction in 2006, which was before Hamas had seized power in Gaza, it seems to me to have been an exceptionally insightful prediction.
Is it any different than any other middle eastern group gaining political influence due to oppression backed by western influence?
Okay I thought they were making a big deal out of it because he just died but man that is straight up prophetic.
He was the guy who didn’t need to worry about getting hired again. This exact chain of events has been entirely predictable for anyone with a basis in politics and history for the last several decades.
Yeah except he wrote his book long after his presidency ended and he chose to ignore the Palestinians during the camp david accords.
I already said this before but at least he admitted his mistakes.
I highly doubt Obama, Trump, or Biden would care even on their deathbed.
Love Jimmy a lot. Very sad he died.
You know he’s a war criminal, right?
Just because he was good to Palestinians doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have been thrown in prison for arming the Indonesians in their massacres of East Timor.
And every American is responsible for voting for politicians that perpetuate conflicts and genocides for their own personal profit, so that doesn’t make you that much better. Just because you outsource the murder to someone else, doesn’t absolve you of it.
Every US President is a war criminal. It’s a question of degree.
Did he? He called out apartheid, but I dont think he expected genocide.
