Carter lies again

Jimmy Carter Falsifies Israeli-Palestinian Reality in USA Today Commentary December 5, 2012	Please click here to support CAMERA's vital work!   Click on the icons below to follow CAMERA:
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Attention CAMERA E-Mail Team:   Ex-President Jimmy Carter slanders Israel in a USA Today commentary, “Statehood Key to Renew Peace Talks; U.N. General Assembly vote recognizing Palestine is a chance to relaunch negotiations despite Israel’s recent counterproductive actions” (December 5). CAMERA documented and exposed many of Carter’s falsifications of the Arab-Israeli conflict and Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy in our 100-page monograph Bearing False Witness: Jimmy Carter’s Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid (available also at Amazon.com). We have continued to expose his prevarications in recurrent “blame Israel” Op-Ed columns with analyses including “Washington Post Allows Carter to Shill for Hamas” (May 4, 2011) and “Carter, Goldstone and Gaza” (Nov. 11, 2009). The former president’s latest anti-Israel commentary—screed, actually—is both more of the same, with its errors and misleading omission, and worse, with its appearance an effort to leverage the General Assembly’s “Palestinian statehood” vote to undermine legitimate Israeli positions and Jewish rights. USA Today apparently believed Carter was beyond fact-checking, since it let him state the following falsehoods, among many others, as fact: • Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government have a “concept of greatly expanding Israel’s borders ….”; • “All Arab nations have offered peace to Israel” on the basis of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242; • Israel’s plan to build in the E-1 area between Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem “cuts the West Bank into two parts and permanently separates East Jerusalem from what would be left”; and • Israel is “rapidly confiscating Palestinian territory for new Israeli settlements ….”   None of these allegations are true. Netanyahu has endorsed a “two-state solution” and repeatedly urged Palestinian Authority leaders to resume unconditional, direct negotiations to reach it. His government has no plan “to greatly expand Israel’s borders”. Only Egypt, in 1979, and Jordan, in 1994, have made peace with Israel. Carter may be referring to the so-called Saudi peace proposal. But its demands of Israel, including withdrawal from all of eastern Jerusalem, West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza Strip and acceptance of the so-called Palestinian “right-of-return” to the Jewish state, before recognition and negotiations, violate Security Council Resolution 242’s terms. Building in E-1 neither cuts the West Bank in two nor separates east Jerusalem from the West Bank.  The West Bank would still be nine miles wide at its narrowest point east of Ma’ale Adumim. Israel in the pre-1967 armistice lines is nine miles wide just north of Tel Aviv, four miles wide just west of Jerusalem. A road built in 2007 through E-1 could be used to link the southern and northern parts of the West Bank, and another could be constructed to the east. Access to Jerusalem from the West Bank would not be precluded by construction in E-1. It could be provided through the Arab neighborhoods or villages of Abu Dis, Eizariya, Hizma and Anata. After more than 40 years of settlement activity, Jewish villages and towns encompass less than five percent of the disputed West Bank. Following the U.N. vote to upgrade the Palestinian Authority’s status from non-state to state observer, Israel announced that it was going ahead with plans for 3,000 new housing units in existing communities and with the E-1 project adjacent to Jerusalem. This is the opposite of “rapidly confiscating Palestinian territory.