Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is President Carter’s personal reflection on the troubled region and the trials and tribulations that he went through in attempting peace for the Middle East. More specifically, President Carter highlights the issue of how Palestine is being systematically dissected and intra-segregated in a form of legalised racism and murderous apartheid which the world has chosen to ignore. Jimmy Carter served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

The blockade of Palestinian territories with impassable concert walls and barriers is plainly an attempt at apartheid and it should be stopped by the international community, argues President Carter. It has torn lives apart, prevented children from going to school, confiscated farm land, and alienated water sources with which Palestinians depend on for their livelihood. These would only further exasperate the Palestinian people and form perfect breeding grounds for radicalism and terrorism.

The book deals with the subject in a very exhaustive yet concise manner. President Carter starts with a history of the area from the days of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference where Jewish Zionist representatives demanded that a homeland be created exclusively for the Jews out of Arab land. At that time, the Ottomans had surrendered the area to the British as an outcome of their defeat in World War I.

Systematically over the decades, Arabs were slowly driven away from their homes and their lands confiscated for the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Peace has been elusive in the Middle East since.

Peace Not Apartheid was published in 2007 against the backdrop of yet another round of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon. Hezbollah operatives took an Israeli soldier hostage in response to the blockade imposed by Israel on the Palestinians. Lebanon was promptly invaded at the cost of thousands of civilian casualties, while the world looked on.

Unfortunately Peace Not Apartheid was picked up in a clearance bin at Borders where it was going for $9.90. It seems that non-interest in Middle Eastern lives persist in all corners of the globe, judging from the amount of obscurity this gem of a book has received on our shelves.