Mennonite Weekly Review

On my desk is Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid by Jimmy Carter, published by Simon & Schuster, 2006, 320 pages, $27.

Marlin Jeschke, of Goshen, Ind., is retired from teaching at Goshen College.

This best-selling book offers a review of Israeli-Palestinian developments from Carter’s first visit to the region in 1973, when he was governor of Georgia, to the war with Lebanon in 2006 and Israel’s current project to erect the separation wall to enclose Palestinians in what is left of the West Bank.

Carter begins with a 10-page chronology of important events in that region up to United Nations Resolution 1701, which established a “fragile cease-fire” in last year’s Israel-Lebanon war.

Carter, the 39th president of the United States, claims at the outset of his book: “There is a formula for peace with justice in this small and unique portion of the world. It is compatible with international law and sustained American government policy, has the approval of most Israelis and Palestinians, and conforms to agreements previously consummated — but later renounced.” It is the two-state solution first proposed by the U.N. in 1947.

Carter then offers a patient recounting of events over the last 34 years. He writes as one involved — first as president of the United States and then as a prominent citizen and head of the Atlanta-based Carter Center — who continues to communicate and visit with Palestinian and Israeli leaders. In all of these efforts, Carter has worked for the realization of a solution to the Middle East problem.

Carter chronicles repeated attempts on the part of the U.N. and the United States and other nations to persuade both Israelis and Palestinians to accept U.N. resolutions 242 and 338, which call for the establishment of two separate and independent states to recognize each other, to accept the borders established for their countries in 1967 and to live in security and peace.

Carter provides background on the key players in the Middle East conflict — Palestinians, Israelis, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia.

He devotes a chapter to his findings during visits with Palestinians, where he saw firsthand their plight under Israeli occupation. He writes: “On average, 12 innocent families lost homes for every person accused of participation in attacks against Israelis… . Almost half of the demolished homes [were] never occupied by anyone suspected of involvement [in] even throwing stones.”

An Israeli peace organization, he writes, charges that “Israel’s policy of punitive demolitions constitutes a grave breach of international humanitarian law, and therefore [is] a war crime.”

After the election of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netan­yahu in 1996, there began a phenomenal expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory. By the year 2000 there were nearly a quarter of a million Israeli settlers in the West Bank and Gaza. “Israel’s continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land,” Carter writes.