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.
Nonetheless, it has much to recommend it. 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.Ĭarter’s counsel lacks a couple of critical elements. (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. Carter describes, albeit altogether too briefly, Hamas’s terror campaign against Israeli civilians. 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. Bush’s policy: his coldness toward negotiations between Israel and Syria, and his effort to isolate Hamas. In short, he should do what Carter says he did to bring peace between Israel and Egypt.Īchieving peace, Carter argues, also requires reversing two elements of George W. Carter implies that Obama must separate support for Israel from support for Israel’s policies. 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. 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.
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. In fact, “We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land” is really a short op-ed article disguised as a book. 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. 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? The war in Gaza raises the question of whether Emanuel’s boss will apply the same approach overseas. “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.
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