By Peter Fernandez

On November 2nd, 1976, James Earl Carter Jr. was elected President of the United States. Earlier that same year, a Brattleboro, Vermont resident met the front-runner during the relatively unknown Democrat’s New Hampshire campaign swing through the southeastern Vermont town bordering New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Indeed, no Vermonter who voted for the peanut farmer could have foreseen that the Georgian gentleman’s benevolent policies regarding Israel could and would sour. After all, he was an “admitted Born Again Christian,” who tend to be pro-Israel.

His grievances with the Jewish state would continue long after his days inside his peculiarly tainted White House. Carter’s book, PALESTINE, NOT APARTHEID, published in 2006, is notable for its wrecking ball rhetoric and baseless rumination against Israel. Sadly, it has become a popular hardcover propaganda pamphlet for Israel haters. A much subtler American variant of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the infamous antisemitic tract produced in Czarist Russia in 1903. After all, an American President wrote it, and not some mediocre British musician who imbibed too much acid, namely pro-Palestine agitator Roger Waters, bass guitarist of the vastly overrated 60’s rock band, Pink Floyd.

The former president was in support of pressuring the Jewish State to give up much of its historical land, Judea and Samaria (The West Bank), even though Israel is only 290 miles long and 84 miles at its widest point. His book also failed to mention that in 1948, 600,000 Sephardic Jews were forced from their ancestral homes in Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Syria, Tunisia, Algeria, and Lebanon. These anti-Zionist governments pocketed every bank account. Israel took in every Jew who applied for Israeli citizenship. Sadly, this has never been the case for the Palestinians, who were abandoned by the surrounding Arab-Muslim countries.

22 Arab-Muslim states could have corrected this 77-year displacement, which they still celebrate as “Al Naqba” or “The Catastrophe.” Perhaps there is too much money to be made by keeping the Palestinians stateless. Also, the Arab states fear Hamas will wage war, like Yasser Arafat’s PLO did in 1970’s Black September against King Hussein’s Hashemite kingdom of Jordan. 

 Had the Arabs accepted the 1947 UN Resolution recognizing Israel as a nation, instead of sending five of their armies  (Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Jordan) to attack the fledgling Jewish state with perhaps the same bloodthirsty intent as Hamas, there would not have been a Palestinian refugee issue.

After the publication of Carter’s error-prone book, fourteen members of the Carter Center’s Board of Councilors resigned. “The departing group included several prominent Jewish businessmen from the Atlanta area,” wrote Mike Evans in his 2007 book, Jimmy Carter, The Liberal Left and World Chaos. “In a letter to the former president, the fourteen men and women cited inaccuracies in the Carter Book, among other inequities, as their reason for tendering their resignation.”

Unfortunately, the only coherent and sensible advice Carter offered regarding Israel/Palestine is not to be found in his  error-prone tome of Jewish state political fables, Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid, but appears in Samuel Segev’s 1994 publication, Jimmy Carter, Foreign Policy and Post Presidential Years: “There ought to be territories ceded for the use of the Palestinians. I think they should be part of Jordan and be administered by Jordan. I think that half of the people of Jordan are Palestinians. That would be my preference.”

The only problem is that the Arab nations are not interested in helping the Palestinians find a separate state unless it encompasses at least half of Jerusalem and the rest of Israel, and that isn’t going to happen.

The Palestinians have been employed asl political pawns for decades to harass Israel by misinforming the world. Islamist terrorists need an enemy, if they are to garner billions of dollars from Iran, Left-wing Europe, and America, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, etc.

According to Alan Dershowitz, in his Huff Post, May 25, 2011, op-ed, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-world-according-to-ji_b_34702:

“His (Carter’s) bias against Israel shows by his selection of the book’s title: ‘Palestine: Peace not Apartheid’ ….Arabs serve in the Knesset, on the Supreme Court, and get to vote for their representatives, many of whom strongly oppose Israeli policies….The reality is that Arab and Muslim nations do, in fact, practice apartheid. In Jordan, no Jew can be a citizen or own land. The same is true in Saudi Arabia, which has separate roads for Muslims and non-Muslims. Even in the Palestinian Authority, the increasing influence of Hamas threatens to create Islamic hegemony over non-Muslims. Arab Christians are leaving in droves.”

Dershowitz goes on to state that “Israel’s motive for holding on to this land is the prevention of terrorism.” Israel exchanged land for peace in 2005. They gave up the entire Gaza Strip for peace and instead received October 7th.

Pro-Palestine protesters scream about the West Bank’s defensive wall that began construction in 2002 and was completed in 2005. Before the barrier was built, over 1,000 Israelis were murdered, mostly civilians, but after the wall separated the Palestinians from the Jews, attacks dropped dramatically.

Carter wrote in his reckless book that “Christian and Muslim Arabs had continued to live in the same land since Roman times. The problem with that statement is that there were no Muslims during Roman times. 476 CE (Christian Era) is what most historians equate with “the fall of the Roman Empire.” Islam was not founded by the Prophet Mohammed until the 7th Century CE, specifically in 610. 

The former president also fails to mention that Jews in Hebron, Tzfat, Jerusalem, and other cities lived in Israel/Palestine thousands of years earlier.

In his clunky apartheid coloring book, Carter often claims that the Palestinians have always embraced a two-state solution, but that the Israelis resisted it. Carter conveniently leaves out the 1938 Peel Commission’s proposal for the two-state remedy. The Palestinians rejected this proposal, but the Jews accepted it even though they would only be granted “a mere sliver of its ancient homeland, and the Palestinians receiving the bulk of the land.” The magnitude of the Arab land offered included present-day Jordan, which was originally three-quarters of Palestine and remains so today.

Carter also criticized the Israeli administration of Muslim and Christian religious sites. The Jewish state, according to Dershowitz, “is scrupulous about ensuring every religion  the right to worship as they please-consistant, of course, with security needs.” The royal Hashemite Court stated, “The Hashemite King’s Custodianship of Jerusalem’s Holy sites has preserved and guaranteed the religious sites of Muslims and Christians and the integrity of their Holy Sites.” The Israeli government allows and supervises this because it wants peace and respects its neighbors. It’s just impossible for the Jewish state to trust such next-door residents.

Between 1948 and 1967, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were occupied by Jordan. The Hashemites prevented Jews from praying (dovening) at the Western Wall. They also vandalized and desecrated Jewish religious sites by transforming cemetery tombstones (matzeivot)  into toilets. Carter also never mentioned Egypt’s cruel 1949-1967 occupation of Gaza.

Finally, Brattleboro’s surprise visitor scarcely raised the Palestinian rejection of the UN’s partition plan in 1948, which Israel accepted.  At the Camp David Accords in 2000, Yasser Arafat walked away from Ehud Barak’s generous offer of 91% to 95% of the West Bank and Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. 

So, Jimmy Carter did indeed set foot in the Green Mountains in 1976, but Republican incumbent Gerald Ford won Vermont with 54.34% of the vote. Carter garnered the remaining 43.14%.