The Unasked Question

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has been floating around these past two weeks and his last public appearance was as the guest of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations at the King David Hotel this morning. Your intrepid blogger, me that is, was present.



There were no demos, outbursts or contretemps. But he managed to display his foolishness just the same.

According to Carter, there were no peace talks for the 6 and half years prior to his book, the anathemetic "Palestine - Peace of Apartheid", appeared. He announced "new settlements" are being established every week and that the despair causes "both sides" to resort to violence.

In a typical sleight-of the-tongue maneuver, Carter that (a) many Pal. have been incarerated for 20 years or so; and (b) many were first jailed at the age of 12; and (c) and that since then they were imprisoned. If he means that Israel has kept behind jail persons who are now 32 and have been behind bars since the age 0f 12, I would suggest he doesn't know his tuches from a peanut.

He also made a semi-dramatic announcement: Hamas will agree to any peace plan the Abbas cabinet reaches with Israel, including recognition of Israel along the 1967 boundaries, as long as there is conducted a plebiscite of the Pal. people supervised by the Carter Center and other internationals.

Dramatic? Okay, idiotic.

Carter doesn't believe that the Hamas will demand that the entire Pal. people all across the gobe are to participate? That they will not start a fratricidal war to make sure the ballot box reflects their bullets? That they are to be trusted at all?

I raised my hand to ask a question.



It was supposed to go like this:

Mr. Carter, you have met twice with Hamas, persons you call terrorists and have announced that anyone involved in the final status resolution should be involved in the negotiations. If so, why do you ignore the Jewish communities in the areas of Samaria and Judea? I myself reside in Shiloh, a community you once tried to have destroyed in 1978. I have sent you several invitations to come see how we have developed since then as we now have celebrated our 30th anniversry. Do you think us as worse than the Hamas?

But, sorry to say, I wasn't recognized before the list of questioners was closed.

Lucky Carter.

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UPDATE

How a referendum would work is not clear. Mr. Carter said in the interview that he understood that only those Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip would participate and that the voting would be monitored by international observers, including observers from the Carter Center.

But Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader in Damascus with whom Mr. Carter had spoken, gave a televised news conference late Monday and said that Hamas wants all Palestinians, including those living abroad, to vote. Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan would likely insist on a right of return to their original homes in what is today Israel, something Israel has said it could never accept.

Mr. Meshal also focused on the return of Palestinians to Israel and Hamas’s refusal to accept Israel’s legitimacy when he said, "Hamas accepts the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital and with full and real sovereignty and full application of the right of the Palestinian refugees to return but Hamas will not recognize the state of Israel."