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The Times
May 28, 2008
Bronwen Maddox
Jimmy Carter's willingness to tell the world the size of Israel's nuclear arsenal, as he did this week, is just the latest sign of his desire to say what his fellow American politicians find unsayable about US policy in the Middle East.
On the basis of Carter's speeches in Britain this week, many Europeans would embrace the 83-year-old former President as their ideal occupant of the White House. But in the actual presidential election in November, Carter's comments, his trip last month to meet Hamas leaders and his book two years ago in which he accused Israel of "apartheid" put him beyond the pale. So much so that Barack Obama took pains to condemn the Hamas trip, despite Carter's supportive remarks on his campaign, lest the pro-Israel lobby's loathing of Carter transfer to him.
That may be Carter's fate: adored abroad and shorn of influence at home. But the divisions within the Democrats on whether to talk to Hamas and Iran, as he urges, and the speed with which the problems will confront the winner in November, mean that if the next president is a Democrat, Carter's views may have some sway, even if no politician will risk thanking him for them.
It is no accident that Tony Blair, like Carter, has found the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock such a usefully absorbing answer to life after power. To those who care about the region, who want to leave their mark and who have exhausted their political capital at home but still have some abroad, it offers the hope of a deal just the other side of a few more conversations.
But in Carter's case this has more than two decades behind it, since his foundation in 1992 of the Carter Centre to promote peace and human rights. It could have been no more than one of those things politicians set up after leaving office earlier than they would have liked, but his real immersion in the region's problems helped to win him the Nobel Peace Prize.
However, his book in 2006, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, earned him accusations of gratuitous offence in comparing Israel's treatment of Palestinians with the white South African regime's treatment of black people.
This week at the Hay book festival, despite asserting that Israel's security was his prime concern, his criticism of Israel's actions on the West Bank and Gaza was far beyond sentiments ever issued by a leading US politician in office. "It is politically impossible for anyone holding public office or running for it to be critical of Israel," he said, while accusing European governments of a "supine" approach.
His assertion that Israel had 150 nuclear weapons was startling because Israel has never confirmed it possesses such weapons, and US politicians never deviate from that line. This was part of his pitch that the US should talk directly to Iran, a course the Bush Administration has treated as only marginally less taboo than meeting Hamas.
But this is the core of Carter's potential influence: the intense debate, on both sides of the political spectrum, about whether the next president might find it worthwhile to talk to those formerly dismissed as enemies, terrorists or both.
"We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel's destruction," Obama said after Carter's Hamas trip, skating round the fact of Hamas's legitimacy, through electoral success, and its senior roles in Palestinian government. Early in his campaign, Obama had advocated talking to Iran and to Fidel Castro, before Clinton accused him of naivety. Since then he has been quiet.
Although no one has the answer to Hamas, or Iran, Carter is entirely right to point out that they are not going away, and that the tactic of shunning them has not worked. He has taken the first step in breaking the American taboo.
© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
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