The Middle East Welcomes Back Carter
Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States, recently visited the Middle East in the capacity of an elder statesman. His self-appointed mission in the region has been to promote peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. For his efforts, Carter has been pilloried by Israeli officials and the more rabid supporters of Israel on this side of the Atlantic. The Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, even went so far as to call the former president a bigot.
Carter’s involvement in the Middle East dates to his term as U.S. president when he facilitated a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt which led to the return of the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula to Egypt in 1978. More recently Carter wrote a book called Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in which he commented on the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. Published in late 2006, according to Carter the book was intended to stimulate the “peace process” in Palestine.
On his recent visit, Carter was snubbed by the Israeli government when he arrived in Israel. His plane was met by foreign ministry officials rather than senior government leaders, as would normally have been the case for a former U.S. president. Indeed, Israeli leaders, with the apparent approval of Washington, are treating Carter as a hostile force, no doubt for daring to use the word “apartheid” in connection with Israeli treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
However, Israel’s brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the separation of Palestinians from Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are very similar to the suppression of non-whites in apartheid-era South Africa. Thus, the apartheid label is quite apt, although unacceptable to the Israelis as it draws attention to the racist nature of the Israeli state.
The second reason Carter was met with hostility during the visit was his plan to meet Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, in the Syrian capital Damascus where the Meshal is in exile. The Israeli government had earlier prevented the former president from entering Gaza to meet with Hamas leaders there. Carter’s speaking to Hamas is considered both in official Washington and official Israel as an equally great betrayal as calling Israel an apartheid state.
Hamas enjoys much support among Palestinians, particularly those living in Gaza, because it has functioned as a social support and economic relief agency providing assistance to Palestinians living in the occupied territories. It took on this role in response the failures of a largely corrupt and dysfunctional Palestinian Authority (PA) in the years following the conclusion of the Oslo Accords in 1993. The Accords created an interim self-governing authority in the occupied Palestinian lands; this was run by the Fatah Party, led by Yasser Arafat until his death in 2004. The PA was almost completely destroyed by the Israeli occupation forces in the early years of this decade following the start of the second Intifada in 2000.
After Arafat’s death, his place at the head of the PA and Fatah was taken by Mahmoud Abbas whose main qualification was that he was acceptable to Washington and Tel Aviv. The chief characteristic of his leadership of the PA has been its abject and conciliatory behaviour the face of the on-going expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, the assassination of Palestinian leaders and militants by Israel and the collective punishment visited on ordinary Palestinians by Israeli occupation forces.
It was therefore not surprising that in the 2006 PA elections Abbas’s Fatah party was defeated by Hamas. It is interesting to note that these elections were supervised by an international observer group led by former President Carter. Although Hamas won the elections convincingly - which were considered by the international observers to have been fair and open – Israeli, American and European governments refused to accept the results and have since boycotted the elected Hamas administration calling it a terrorist organization. Furthermore, in summer 2007, at the instigation of the U.S. and Israel, Abbas attempted to destroy Hamas militarily using the Fatah militia. However, when the fighting ended, Hamas was left in more or less complete control of Gaza while Abbas and his Fatah organization remained in power in the West Bank.
Israel’s reaction was to boycott not just Hamas but the entire Gaza strip. In an effort to reduce support for Hamas among Palestinians in Gaza Israel imposed an embargo on food, fuel, and water that has reduced the population of 1.4 million to misery and near starvation. However, while none of this has undermined the support Hamas enjoys among the residents of Gaza, it has focused the world attention on the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza and shone a light on the on-going brutality of Israel’s continued occupation and control of Gaza.
The situation in Gaza has created a crisis for the American administration as well. It is faced with an ugly humanitarian disaster and a complete impasse between the Palestinians and the Israeli government. Washington and Tel Aviv will not speak to or have any dealings with Hamas. They insist on dealing only with Mahmoud Abbas who has little or no credibility with a majority the Palestinian people. His strategy of making endless concessions to Israel in negotiations has produced nothing but more negotiations while Israel continues to expand its settlements, murder Palestinian leaders and exact collective punishment on the civilian population. Hamas, by contrast, has refused to bow to constant Israeli terror and intimidation.
In this context, Carter’s trip can be seen as an attempt to overcome the crisis that the Israeli violence and aggression has created for U.S. imperial interests in the Middle East, and more generally in the Muslim world. The U.S. is bogged down in two unpopular and losing occupations of Muslim lands which have undermined its position in the region. More importantly, the weakening of the U.S. weakens its client states in the area. The U.S. desperately needs at least the appearance of progress on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Carter has a long history of pulling the chestnuts out of the fire for U.S. imperialism. In 1994 he saved the Clinton administration from a potentially disastrous confrontation with North Korea, brokering a deal which saw the North Koreans mothball their heavy-water nuclear power plants in exchange for a U.S. promise to build light-water reactors in their place. Although the U.S. later reneged on its promises, Carter’s intervention allowed Clinton to back off from the brink of war while saving face. In 2002 when the U.S, Bush administration was threatening to invade Cuba over allegations that it was producing biological warfare weapons, Carter travelled to Cuba to investigate the claims. After visiting several Cuban facilities Carter reported that he had found no evidence of biological weapons research. The fact that the Bush administration subsequently dropped the claims without even questioning Carter’s expertise on the subject indicates that it was using Carter to extricate itself from a predicament created by its own bellicose rhetoric.
Similarly, Carter’s meeting with Hamas is a statement that the refusal of the U.S. and Israel to talk to Hamas has been counterproductive and inimical to U.S. interests in the Middle East. Carter’s courting and promotion of Hamas as a participant in the “peace” process has very little to do with Hamas or the interests of the Palestinian people. Rather it is an indication of the bankruptcy of American policy in the Middles East and a call to change direction in the face of impending disaster. It is an attempt to save U.S. imperialism from itself and to stave off the complete collapse of its Middle East policies.