President Carter upsets the Bush administration

Author: Rosa Maria Young

Starting on April 13th President Carter traveled to Israel, the West Bank, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan and met with leaders of each of those nations. This trip has been extensively criticized in the US especially by the Bush administration, as well as by the government of Israel - not for the trip in itself but for the meetings with Hamas and the Syrian government. The US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said “we counseled President Carter against” the trip. She added that the administration wanted to make sure that there would not be confusion thinking that Carter was a party to peace negotiations. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went further by refusing to see Carter, who has been critical of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians.

During all this Carter said that he was not a negotiator but only aimed to help Israeli-Palestinian communication and boost American understanding of the conflict. A conflict that has lasted for decades, with several US presidents working with different enthusiasm on it and unfortunately never managing to solve it. Carter himself, during his presidency, helped negotiate the key 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. But he said he did not want to mediate again, rather to point out that he believes it is a mistake to exclude Hamas and Syria from talks. I am sure that if in the US people manage to put aside for a short time the duel between Obama and Clinton this is a subject that would create many a discussion. And it is not an easy subject.

Many of us think about all the suffering of the Jewish people during the Hitler years and have a tendency which is totally understandable to side with them. But, as some acquaintances have point out to me, what about the Palestinians, the scapegoats in an ideological war between the Arabs and the Jewish in the Middle East? Don’t they have rights as well? And is it true that when one becomes aware of the conditions they live in day in day out for decades that one asks oneself: how would I act if I was Palestinian? It is so easy to say they are terrorists… and in the meantime their suffering goes on. Maybe President Carter should be praised instead of criticized or ridiculed for what he has attempted to do: to obtain a clear view of the many sides of the Middle East conflict.

President Carter’s ended his presidency nearly two decades ago and since then, instead of retiring to play golf or other such pursuits, he founded the Carter Center in 1982 to dedicate his life to the advancement of worldwide peace. It can be easily said that his legacy as diplomat and statesman really began after his presidency.
During this last trip the most controversial part was his trip to Syria and his contact with the Hamas officials that he met in Cairo. Last Thursday he asked them to halt rocket attacks against Israel. He said Hamas leaders had told him they would accept a peace agreement with Israel negotiated by Abbas if the Palestinians approved it in a referendum. And he added, “one of the reasons I wanted to come and meet with the Syrians and Hamas was to set an example that might be emulated by others.”
On the last days of his trip he flew to Damascus where after talks with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, he went to the offices of the exiled Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal with whom he held talks in defiance of strong objections from the US and Israel. On his return to Israel, in his address to the Israel Council on Foreign Relation, President Carter said, “We believe that the problem is not that I met Hamas in Syria, the problem is that Israel and the United States refuse to meet with these people, who must be involved.”

Shouldn’t we all hope that this trip brings some hope to both those Israelis and Palestinians who have been living with fear and hate for so long? Even if Carter’s meetings bring no immediate result, they have some symbolic value at a time when the peace process which the Bush administration, in its last throes pretended to restart at the Annapolis summit last November, is foundering. As expressed in the preliminary report on the Middle East published by the Carter Center on Monday : “We knew that some of our meetings – particularly with Hamas and the Syrian government – would be viewed negatively in some quarters. Our intention was to obtain a clear view of the many sides of the Middle East conflict. We believe that the problem is not that we met them, but that the U.S. and Israeli governments refuse to meet with them. This unwillingness to talk makes peace harder to achieve.”
To read the rest of the report go to http://www.cartercenter.org/

According to the latest news, Meshaal has said that his Islamic group “would respect Palestinian nationals even if it was against our convictions”. Hamas also said that they plan to give Egyptian mediators a response on Thursday to a propose truce with Israel.