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What Carter Missed in the Middle East

[Washington Post] Elliott Abrams - In an op-ed on Sunday, former president Jimmy Carter, speaking on behalf of a self-appointed group of "Elders," described a rapacious Israel facing long-suffering, blameless Palestinians, who are contemplating a "nonviolent civil rights struggle" in which "their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela." Carter's efforts to portray life among the Palestinians as unbearable and getting worse are belied by data. While positive views of personal and family safety and security in the West Bank stood at 25% four years ago, they have risen to 58% in the past year, according to Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki. Carter states that Gaza is a "walled-in ghetto." But Gaza is not an enclave surrounded by Israel; it has a border with Egypt, a point Carter overlooks in his efforts to blame Palestinian problems exclusively on the Jewish state. While Carter warns that a Palestinian "civil rights struggle" is in the offing, he says nothing about Palestinian violence in the real world - in which Palestinian terrorist groups continue to attack Israel and where all of Gaza is in the hands of one such group, Hamas. Carter claims that the expansion of Israeli settlements is "rapidly" taking Palestinian land. Yet four years ago Israel gave up Gaza and all the settlements there (plus four small West Bank settlements). Moreover, while the population in Israel's West Bank settlements is growing, they are not expanding physically. New construction is almost all "up and in," meaning that the impact on Palestinians is limited. Most inaccurate of all, and most bizarre, is Carter's claim that "a total freeze of settlement expansion is the key" to a peace agreement - not a halt to terrorism, not the building of Palestinian institutions, not the rule of law in the West Bank, not the end of Hamas rule in Gaza. The writer, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, served as a deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush administration.
2009-09-08 08:00:00
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