Don’t suppress Carter or opportunity for peace

Now that the season of electoral expediency is over, President-elect Barack Obama owes former president Jimmy Carter an apology — and an invitation.

At the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Democrats denied Carter the traditional invitation to speak that is accorded to former presidents.

According to The Jewish Daily Forward, “Carter’s controversial views on Israel cost him a place on the podium at the Democratic Party convention in late August, senior Democratic operatives acknowledged.”

Silencing Carter, who negotiated the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, involved behind the scenes tensions between supporters of the hard-line American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and those Democrats who argued both respect and free speech to let Carter join Bill Clinton on the stage and address a national audience.

First, there was a compromise offer to let Carter speak but only on domestic policy subjects. This would have kept him from mentioning his views on securing peace between the Israelis and Palestinians through a two-state solution essentially back to the region’s 1967 borders. Carter previously elaborated his analysis and recommendations in his 2006 bestseller, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Even this astonishing restriction on the former president was unacceptable to the party’s dictatorial censors. They wanted nothing from the deliberate, candid Georgian short of complete exclusion.

It is false to attribute this shutdown to the opinions of Jewish Americans, a majority of whom polls show support a two-state solution and disagree on other issues with the AIPAC lobby, as recently documented by Eric Alterman in The Nation.

The convention planners, with the full knowledge and approval of their candidate arranged to have a short video on Carter’s work during the post-Katrina crisis, followed by a walk across the stage by Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, to applause.

Little of what Carter wrote and spoke about has not been said by many prominent Israelis, leading newspapers and columnists for years.

Hundreds of Israeli reservists, called “refuseniks,” have declined to fight in the West Bank or Gaza, though they will defend Israel’s borders to the utmost.

Carter knew fully what the Party did to him. But he played the loyal Democrat as a good sport and avoided a ruckus without even a public grumble. Privately, however, he and Rosalynn were very upset, believing that political pandering prevents the United States from playing a key role in peace-making between the powerful Israelis and their Palestinian neighbors.

In a March 2008 poll by the respected Haaretz newspaper in Israel, 64 percent of Israelis supported “direct negotiations with Hamas”— the elected government of Gaza that now accepts a two-state solution back to the 1967 borders.

This is an auspicious time for vigorous peacemaking by the new Obama Administration as a steady, honest broker.

The serious offer by the Arab League in 2002 for such an agreement, coupled with diplomatic and economic relations with the Arab countries was reiterated dramatically on Nov. 10 with a full-page message in the New York Times.

Headlined “Peace is Possible: More than 50 Arab and Muslim Countries Agree,” the Center for Middle East Peace & Cooperation reminds Americans of that Arab Peace Initiative, reiterated in 2007, and supported by the fifty-seven member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The dramatic declaration, replete with all the flags of these countries, ended with the plea: “Let us not miss this opportunity.”

The Israeli government has not engaged this long-standing offer by the Arab League. Without President-elect Obama taking a strong initiative in America’s national interest, it is unlikely that there will be any serious engagement. A sign that he is determined to set the peace process on course is whether he expresses his regrets about the suppression of a former president whose views on the Palestinian question reflect those of many Americans.

Carter — the early peacemaker between Israel and Egypt (for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize) — has remained the most steadfast, prominent American friend that the Israeli and Palestinian peoples have in securing a stable peace in that region. The new president should welcome Carter’s wise and seasoned counsel.

• Ralph Nader, a lawyer and consumer advocate, was an independent candidate for president in 2008.