MIDDLE EAST: In Lebanon, Jimmy Carter dishes on Obama's Israel policy

Arabs concerned that Hillary Clinton will tilt the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama strongly toward Israel need not worry, says Jimmy Carter.

The future secretary of State's pro-Israel stance will be balanced out by Obama's national security adviser, Gen. Jim Jones, who Carter said will adopt a more nuanced view toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Jones helped train Palestinian security forces, leading to one of the most successful recent experiments in Palestinian autonomy.

"Jim Jones is thoroughly familiar with the situation in Palestine," the former president and human rights activist told an audience of students, faculty and others at the American University of Beirut on Friday night.

Carter was in Beirut over the last few days meeting with Lebanese officials and other luminaries. He also appeared before an overflow crowd at AUB, where he answered questions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the upcoming Lebanese parliamentary elections, which his Carter Center is currently scheduled to monitor.

Carter, who brokered the peace deal between Israel and Egypt and later won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of the homeless, has become a controversial figure lately for his outspoken criticism of Israeli settlement and construction activities in the Palestinian territories. His book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," caused a firestorm of protest by supporters of Israel offended by his comparison of the policies of the Jewish State to those of white-ruled South Africa up until the 1990s.

Though Carter has strained relations with the Bush administration, the U.S. envoy to Lebanon, Ambassador Michele Sison, appeared for the talk. A minor kerfuffle emerged from the visit after the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah rejected Carter's request for a meeting, branding him an agent of the U.S. administration. Carter had wanted to meet with representatives from the group to get an OK for monitoring the May 2009 elections.

But he shrugged when an audience member asked why he thought Hezbollah refused to meet with him, saying he wasn't going to "beg" for a sitdown, and in any case intermediaries had told him it OK for his foundation to monitor the vote.

During his talk, Carter made an impassioned appeal for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but heaped most of his criticism on Israeli policies. He said that the United Nations, the Arab League, the Geneva Accords and the "Quartet," made up of the U.S., the European Union, Russia and the U.N., had already provided the legal framework for a viable peace between Israel and a future Palestinian state.

He urged Israel to remove most West Bank settlements and restrict construction of an Israeli security barrier or wall to Israel's 1967 borders.

He criticized the EU for abandoning its "responsibility" for resolving the conflict and allowing the pro-Israel policies of the Bush administration to drive any peace process.

But he was hopeful that the Obama administration would get a quick start on addressing the festering 60-year conflict on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean.

Carter said Obama had told him privately that he would begin working on the problems of the "Holy Land," as Carter calls it, early in his term, unlike Bush and former President Bill Clinton, who launched peace initiatives at the end of their presidencies.

But he described "tremendous political pressure" in the U.S. to adhere to the policies of the Israeli government. "It's not easy as an elected official to avoid these pressures," he told the audience.

He said he was disappointed by Obama's remarks at a meeting of the American Israeli Political Action Committee meeting earlier this year arguing for an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

"I was perhaps the most disturbed American out of 350 million Americans when he made his speech to AIPAC," Carter said. "I was taken aback."

But he said he called the then-candidate afterward and received a clarification, which Obama also reiterated in a CNN interview.

Carter said he believed a just settlement between the Palestinians and Israelis would help reduce terrorism. "If the Palestinian issue was resolved peacefully and justly and with human rights, a great deal of the animosity toward my country would be alleviated," he said.

-- Borzou Daragahi in Beirut

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Photos: At top, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter waves during his speech at the American University of Beirut on Friday. Credit: Wael Hamzeh / European Pressphoto Assn.

At middle, U.S. Charge d'Affaires Michele Sison, center, before Carter's talk. Credit: Grace Kassab / Associated Press

At bottom, students gather outside the hall as Carter speaks. Credit: Grace Kassab / Associated Press

Comments

[Jane]

What do you all think of Jimmy Carter's 2009 book, "We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan that Will Work?"

[vit]

*** Read What 'LansdowneMike' Wrote ! ***
*** HE IS TOTALLY CORRECT ! ***

[Re Folin]

The Americans are so good, so kind, they accepted and will accept millions of illegal immigrants. They also can accept millions of Palestinians.

[Norman G Smith]

President Carter's bestseller: "Israel-Peace not Apartheid" was a brilliant expose' of the racist Israeli govt. The Gaza strip is essentially a concentration camp. 1.5 million people are locked in , starving, and subjected to daily attacks by helicopters and tanks.

The Israeli govt is a ruthless terrorist organization disguised as a government.

Shame on Obama for supporting Israel's Apartheid regime. What a hypocrite! I regret hosting a celebration the night Obama won.

[LansdowneMike]

There are three sides to the Israel-Palestine question:
- the rabid right that wants Israel to keep what it won in 1967 no matter what the consequences;
- the lunatic left that wants Israel to give up everything it won in 1967 and also accept all refugees and their descendants from the 1948 war;
- and the struggling center, made up of some Israelis, some Palestinians, and some Americans, who want to fashion a new state in Palestine with all of Gaza, some (but not all) of the West Bank, some (but not all) of Jerusalem and its suburbs, some (but not all) of the 1948 refugees receiving compensation for their losses, and an international agreement to crack down hard on the threats to the security of both Israel and Palestine.

Jimmy Carter has firmly aligned himself with the left in this area and has thus made himself irrelevant (except to the Arabs and their friends who fund his various projects).

[Marty]

Will someone please tell Jimmy Carter to go back to Georgia & pick peanuts. The new administration does not need his help in the middle East. Cater showed what he could do with foreign policy when Iran took over the US embassy. Carter showed his great skill's in the middle East when he forced Israel to give back land that was taken away from an invading country after that country tried & failed to conquer Israel. Please Jimmy, go back home, drink old bottles of your brothers beer & eat peanuts, Marty

[GS]

I am a lifelong Democrat but I cannot stand Jimmy Carter. This may continues to mouth off in a way that is hurtful to U.S. national security, and undermines the U.S.'s ability to act as a fair arbiter in the region. Perhaps he just a little bit senile, and it is no surprise the only audiences he can find to speak to are in the Arab World -- Americans know he has nothing of any worth to say.

[Daniel Yakoubian]

It is so sad that only former or outgoing presidents of the US and (prime minister) Israel have the courage to speak the truth. Take a look at what Olmert said was necessary and just for peace with the Palestinians and their supporters - the same thing as Carter. Give back illegal settlements, give back comparable land to that taken illegally from the Palestinians, maintain Jerusalem as the a mutil-religious city/capital shared with Palestine. Like Olmert said, anyone thinking that less is fair or viable to resolve this dispute is denying reality.

[John Crandell]

If only Mr. Carter had had an equal degree of common sense in regards to the Iranian Shah and the Somoza regime in central America, subsequent history might have been so different in those two locales.

[Asher Garber]

Wake me when Jimmy Carter actually overtly supports Jewish autonomy in the Middle East, accepts that Jewish refugees were created from Arab countries when Israel was created by the UN in 1947, and actually speaks out against the Hezbollah, for example, who consider themselves the Party of God, even while convincing gullible, ghetto Arab children to blow up a bus, shoot some missles, or watch a video in which a Jew has his head chopped off.

Then maybe I'll care what he has to say.

[Peter]

I hope President Carter is right. No one has done more to bring peace to the middle east than Jimmy Carter yet no one has been more vilified by Israeli right-wing religious fanatics than he has.

[John Smith]

Former president Jimmy Carter is doing great things for world peace.

The Palestine Review
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