Damn straight, Jimmy...and while we're on the topic, let's remember that the minority of Israelis he refers to has a lot of friends in the US Congress and the American foreign policy apparatus, as well as a permanent lobby group (AIPAC).

There was a great presentation at the Carter Center over this book that was on C-SPAN this past weekend. Watch it if you get the chance.

I think people have this concept that criticism of one group is choosing sides. In reality, both "sides" are deeply flawed. The only good that's come out of the Iraq War is to draw attention away from both, thus forcing them - for the most part - to deal with their own inconsistencies and not drag everyone else into it.

And the way forward is a peace process, with the goal of a Palestinian state, which the Palestinians have blocked and fought and bombed their way against every step of the way. No Palestinian "leader" has ever made a legitimate move towards a negotiated solution. The only thing they have to offer is suicide bombers and a pan-Arab plan to drive the Jews into the sea.

@3: "I think people have this concept that criticism of one group is choosing sides."--You're so right. It's distressingly illogical.

My point is that our former President has equally criticized both sides. When one looks at the body of his words and deeds in entirety, one realizes he's trying to move us on from the Us-Them stalemate we've allowed ourselves to be locked into.

Sorry, Will in Seattle (@6); I didn't mean for my comment to be taken ironically at all. Criticizing one side does NOT mean choosing a side; assuming that such a critic has chosen sides IS illogical. That kind of knee-jerk categorizing is a bad habit of thought. I'm for anything Jimmy Carter can do to move us off of Us v. Them. Judging by the reaction to his book, though, knee-jerkism is winning.

"The only thing they [Palestinian leaders] have to offer is suicide bombers and a pan-Arab plan to drive the Jews into the sea."

One, that's bullshit. Two, that still doesn't provide carte blanche for Israel to wall off the occupied territories, refuse to grant them full statehood, break them up into microterritories partitioned by security zones settlements and iraeli-only highways, bomb their civil administration to smithereens, assassinate abduct and torture Palestinian citizens at will, imprison Palestinians for years without charge, steal their water, destroy their agriculture, etc.

If you think Israel has negotiated in good faith, or ever sought to grant Palestinians a totally independent state that would govern a territory along pre-invasion 1967 borders, then you haven't read Carter's book.

Ah, so 1967 is sacred? Even though the wars that changed those boundaries were started by Arabs, not Israelis, with the expressly stated aim of driving Israel into the sea? A commitment which virtually every single Palestinian shares to this day.

The occupied territories are not "walled off", they're fenced off, because they're trying to keep the motherfucking suicide bombers out and nothing else has worked. There are sections of wall near Jerusalem.

People who blow up buses and cafes deserve no quarter. People whose television broadcasts glorify those who blow up buses and cafes, and provide instruction on how to do it, deserve nothing. That lets out everyone in any leadership position in Palestine for the past fifty years; who exactly is Israel supposed to be negotiating WITH?

They bomb their "civil administration" because their civil administration is the source of acts of terror. And not just against Israel; the Palestinians are all too happy to beat and shoot each other if the opportunity presents itself.

Israel offered Arafat a state in 1994. They walked out of the negotiations in a huff, for the simple reason that Arafat never wanted a real state; that would have crumbled his criminal empire. He wanted a bogeyman on the other side of the checkpoint so he could continue to run his money machine.

If the Palestinians had spent 1/100th the effort on building an economy that they instead put into building an empire of death they'd have their state now, and people would want to live in it. Instead, they have a shithole, of their own making.

Israel has been forced to accept the refugees of dozens of countries that used to have significant Jewish minorities, from all over the Arab world, Africa, Asia and Europe. The Arab countries have accepted nothing; they forced out their Jews in a series of pogroms, in Iraq, Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, everywhere. Read your Ottoman Empire history and ask yourself "what happened to the Jews?" They went to Israel, and they were taken in.

No one takes in the Palestinians, even though by rights they already have a state; it's called "Jordan" now, but the guy who runs it as a dictatorship has considerably less legitimate claim to it (i.e., none) than Israel does to their land. His family is from the Hijaz, Mecca and Medina, and were granted a huge chunk of Palestine by tricking the Brits after WWI into thinking that they were important people, which they were not. Why don't the Palestinians go to Jordan? How does Jordan feel about the poor Palestinians?

Thank you for clarifying that a thirty foot tall concrete barrier is a fence and not a wall.

Oh and that almost 4 million people should have no quarter from the Israeli military, no rights in relation to the Israeli state, and no access to government-provided clean water, electricity or health care. In fact, that they deserve "no quarter" for the foreseeable future. Who needs to read Jimmy Carter's book when you already know that Palestinians don't deserve human rights?

And who needs truth, when you can believe that Israel's total control of Palestinian trade, its military "incursions", its bombing of civilian infrastructure, its systematic destruction or seizing of Palestinian agricultural land, its refusal to grant permits to Palestinian firms that might compete with Israeli ones, etc has had no effect on the Palestinian economy?

Also, it’s pretty amazing to learn that Israel would rather grant Palestine independence than occupy it. You’d think that the only reason it even has settlements in the West Bank is because Arafat asked for them (he didn't).

"Why don't the Palestinians go to Jordan?" Umm. Because that would be called ethnic cleansing.

Terrorism and suicide bombing are grisly, immoral acts. But again, they haven’t given carte blanche for Israel to act with impunity, or pretend that it has done nothing to inflame the region. Israel is a pariah state of the world, with the U.S., its only friend, a close second. The willfull blindness and bellicose militarism of both societies toward the plight of the Palestinians, and their complete disavowal of the legitimacy of international law, has set the Middle East and in some ways the world back decades.

Yes, yes, it's all Israel's fault. The billions of dollars in aid that Arafat stole, that's Israel's fault. Israel made him buy the four giant houses in Paris and the Mediterranean villa, while he doled out small handfuls of bills to his supplicants.

If Israel packed up and went away forever, and left all the infrastructure they've built behind, and the world community chipped in and gave the Palestinians another hundred billion, in a decade they'd still be living in piles of garbage.

Wf, you are wrong on the facts and wrong on the spirit of the thing. Again, I ask: who is Israel supposed to negotiate with: the crooks, or the terrorists? Those are the only two choices. There are no moderate Palestinians any more. They've proven many times over that they have no interest in any solution that doesn't involve millions of dead Jews. And Western apologists like yourself and Rachel Corrie and all the rest know it, and don't care. Why?

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