Jason Carter said this recently about his grandfather, Jimmy Carter: “This is a good man who has done remarkable things with his life and has taken the opportunities that he was given and used them to do good.” Other assessments differ, particularly when it comes to Carter’s stance toward Israel.
After the Six-Day War, a war it fought in self-defense, Israel might have held on to territories from which the Arab aggression was launched not just in 1967, but in the 1948 war as well. But instead, Israel decided to give back all of the Sinai to Egypt, land that constituted 95% of the territories it had won in the conflict. And later, it gave up Gaza to its Arab inhabitants as well, closing down all the Jewish settlements that had been created there as a defensive barrier, and handing over to the Gazan Arabs extensive greenhouses in the hope that they might make good use of them (instead, the Gazan Arabs chose to destroy them). This handing over of both the Sinai and Gaza hardly registers with Jimmy Carter, who depicts the Israelis as making a grab for what he calls “Palestinian land.”
In his article, and in his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, Carter paints a damning picture of Israel as the obstacle to peace; he fails to mention the yielding of all that territory, or the many peace overtures that Israel has made to the Arabs ever since 1949, when it offered to make the armistice lines into permanent boundaries, but the Arabs rejected the offer. Carter complains “Israel is building more and more settlements, displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands.” Apparently he is unfamiliar with the fact that Jewish “settlements” are approved by the Israeli government only after a rigorous investigation to see if the land in question is considered to be “state or waste lands” that, by Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine, are explicitly to be used for Jewish settlements:
The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.
In building on “state and waste lands,” there has been no “displacing” of “Palestinians.” By definition, “state and waste lands” are those to which no individual has valid title. The procedure for getting approval for a “settlement” from the Israeli government is long and arduous. First, notice is given for private parties to produce evidence of ownership. If no valid titles are produced, the parcel of land is regarded as “state and waste lands.” In a few cases, settlements on private land have been deemed legal, but only if they were determined to be a military necessity. In those cases, the original owner retains title to the land and must be paid rental fees for its use.
That scrupulous reliance on decisions of the Israeli Supreme Court, that solicitousness for the rights of Arab owners, paints a very different picture from that which Jimmy Carter offers of Israel “displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands.” There has been hardly any “displacement,” and what Carter calls the “occupation of Palestinian lands” misleads. One more time (it can’t be repeated often enough): these are not “Palestinian lands,” but territory allocated in 1922 to the Palestine Mandate, which had as its exclusive aim the creation of the Jewish National Home. And Article 6 (see above) required of the Mandatory (Great Britain) that it both “facilitate Jewish immigration” and “encourage …close settlement by Jews on the land, including State and waste lands.”
The Israeli claim under the Mandate is further buttressed by the requirement, set out in UN Resolution 242, for “secure and recognized boundaries.” If Israel were to be pushed back within the pre-1967 armistice lines, with a nine-mile wide waist from Qalqilya in the West Bank to the sea, and lose control of the Judean hills and the Jordan Valley, this sliver of a country would have great difficulty defending itself, and would have to remain in a permanent state of high alert, of a degree and kind that no other country has ever been asked to endure.
The real ”key words” of Resolution 242, as crafted mainly by Lord Caradon, are those about the need for “secure and defensible borders.” Carter doesn’t even mention this phrase, which Lord Caradon thought was the most important provision of the Resolution. For Carter surely knows that the pre-1967 lines he wants Israel to be forced back into would fit no one’s definition of “secure and recognizable boundaries.” But what would constitute “secure and recognizable boundaries”? They would have to be “defensible borders.”
The Israelis certainly think command of the heights of Judea and Samaria, and of the Jordan Valley. and thus of the invasion route from the East, remain essential. Were Israel to be pushed back to the 1949 armistice lines, as Carter so ardently wishes, a massed Muslim army, with the weaponry that the Arabs, Iran, and Turkey now possess, coming at Israel from the East, could slice Israel in two at its nine-mile-wide waist.
Namer says
Carter was a horrible president and an obvious antisemite. I believe carter wanted the hard corps Islamists to take over every middle eastern country so they could band together and destroy Israel.
James Lincoln says
Jimmy Carter – the one person who makes Sleepy Joe look alert.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Not too sure about that. I’m sure that once Joe goes, he won’t bother at all about politics: he’ll be too busy at the beach wearing his aviators. Carter, by contrast, is remarkably politically active. In fact, I daresay had we had Carter instead of Biden these last 3.6 years, we’d have been better off
Bertrum Adder says
Why would we have been better off. Makes no sense on reading of Carter’s position as noted in his anti semitic treatise of his so called book.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
He may have been anti-Semitic (as is Biden – former protege of KKKlansman Robert C Byrd and Israel enemy), but there is no evidence that had Carter inherited an economy like Trump gave him, that he would have tanked it in service to the Climate Change movement
gravenimage says
Infidel–with all respect–being active is only good if one’s policies are. Apart from his work with Habitat for Humanity, we would have been better off with Carter lounging at the beach.
Pam says
Jimmy Carter is, to be blunt, an anti-Semite.
gravenimage says
Yep.
Walter Sieruk says
To answer the question “What was and what is Jimmy Carter ?” As for the first part of the question . First, Carter was a terrible US President. To give only one of many examples . Carter had a hand in destroying a government of Iran ,under e Shah Pahlavi, that was friendly to the United States and having in replaced by an agressive hostile fundamentalist Islamic regime which hates America and Israel with a vicious malice deadly passion.
Second, Carter was a terrible author , as proven by that book he wrote , described in this jihad watch article. That Carter wrote an anti- Israel , anti-Jewish and pro- Islamic book ,that was awful.
As for that last part of the above question which is “what was Jimmy Carter.”
The answer is that Carter is a feeble and worn out old man, who was during his active years was awful nationally and internationally, regarding the Middle East.
libertyORdeath says
I’ve always said that the Sinai should have been held as a refuge for the Muslims who refuse to live alongside Israel in peace. “Land for peace” was always a ridiculous strategy to those who have studied this conflict in-depth. The only way to achieve peaceful coexistence is to convince the Arabs that opposition to Israel, one of MANY countries created by the division of the former Ottoman Empire, is futile and costly.
You will never get peace through land deals or swapping hostages for terrorists. It will only come from a strong Israel backed by a strong America and the West.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Hugh
I’m not sure that Carter deserves so many column inches, especially given everything else that threatens Israel today
Jim Harmon says
Ahh yess, he was the world’s greatest humanitarian! Of course, his only actual “humanitarian” cause was “Stop the Semitism!”.
Billy Corr says
On “ethnic cleansing”- so-called – in one of his books, Jimmy Carter tells of going with his brother
Billy (of Blessed Memory) to look for arrowheads along creek banks after rainstorms.
These arrowheads had been left by “the people who used to live there.”
krauser robert says
Dear Mr F. -ya ibn el halal
Please publish the photo of carter(sic) with haniyeh, child on knees.
Without legend under the picture.
NoTaqiyya says
Jimmy Peanuts Carter was the worst POTUS until Joe Biden. This is the misguided hillbilly who handed Iran to the murderous Mullahs of Iran.
He is also the one who betrayed Nicaragua to the tyrannical Sandinistas. He even ordered an Israeli ship loaded with aid to the long standing ally of the USA.
Now Nicaragua has been reduced from a net exporter in the seventies, to another Socialist hellhole like Cuba and Venezuela. Stupidy all around.
gravenimage says
Well, there was also Obama…
Walter Sieruk says
As Joe Biden was nothing but failure and disaster for Afghanistan and the people of that land, and to the State of Israel a curse. Likewise, was Jimmy Carter a catastrophe for Iran and for the Iranian people as well as a calamity to Israel.
Ralph says
Jimmy Carter is a horrible fraud who tricked his way into the White House. Typical Democrat/communist MO. Many readers will not remember the Carter presidency, when home mortgage rates rose to 18%. He may have been better than Biden, but they both stink as executives and human beings.