What Carter Missed in the Middle East
In an op-ed on Sunday [“The Elders’ View of the Middle East”], former president Jimmy Carter, speaking on behalf of a self-appointed group of “Elders,” described a rapacious Israel facing long-suffering, blameless Palestinians, who are contemplating a “nonviolent civil rights struggle” in which “their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.”
As with most of Carter’s recent statements about Israel and the Palestinians, instead of facts we get vignettes from recent Carter travels. And while he finds “a growing sense of concern and despair” among “increasingly desperate” Palestinians, polls do not sustain this view. The most recent survey by the leading Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki (done in August, the same month Carter visited), shows “considerable improvement in public perception of personal and family security and safety in the West Bank and a noticeable decrease in public perception of the existence of corruption in [Palestinian Authority] institutions.” This doe