Jimmy Carter is 92 now, and it has been 36 years since his landslide defeat for reelection. But neither the passage of time nor the debilities of age slow him from making proposals that will do real harm to the State of Israel — and he has just tried one more time.
In Monday’s New York Times, he writes that “America must recognize Palestine” and presents a version of Israeli reality that simply takes leave of the facts. Carter tells us that “the simple but vital step this administration must take before its term expires on Jan. 20 is to grant American diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine, as 137 countries have already done, and help it achieve full United Nations membership.”
Now, granting diplomatic recognition to “the state of Palestine” will no more make it a legitimate and genuine country than granting diplomatic recognition to Plains, Ga., would make it one. The fact that 137 countries have done so — to no effect whatsoever — ought to make that obvious. So, what is Carter’s real goal here? He writes that it is peace, but the steps he proposes and the analysis he offers would leave Israel and the Palestinians further from peace than ever.
The “facts” Carter adduces are not only wrong, but tricky and misleading. For example, he writes that there are “600,000 Israeli settlers.” That number can only be reached by counting every Israeli living in Jerusalem — including in the Jewish Quarter, and the parts barred to Jews by Jordan before 1967 — as settlers. He writes that “Israel is building more and more settlements, displacing Palestinians and entrenching its occupation of Palestinian lands,” but he offers no data — because there is none to support his claim. Anyone who has visited the West Bank knows that virtually all settlements have not displaced Palestinians but have been, instead, built on fallow land, and the number of settlements and the land they take up rises very slowly indeed. The actual land area taken up by settler buildings themselves covers perhaps 1 percent of the West Bank, though far more falls within settlement boundaries. Roughly 12 percent of the West Bank lies to the west of the security barrier built by Israel to stop Palestinian terrorism. That barrier is not moving, or creeping, or taking up more land.