Fourteen members of an advisory board to the Carter Center in Atlanta resigned Thursday in protest over Jimmy Carter’s best-selling new book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying that they could “no longer in good conscience continue to serve.”
The resignations were the latest episode in an escalating controversy over the book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” published in late November. It has been criticized within the American Jewish community as tilting sharply toward the Palestinians.
Scholars have found fault with the former president’s fact- checking on small and large points. At least one former Mideast negotiator has expressed outrage over what he called “misrepresented” history.
The straw that broke board member Steve Berman’s back, he said Thursday, appeared on Page 213, in a passage he quoted easily from memory: It was imperative, Carter wrote, that Arabs and Palestinians “make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals” of an internationally proposed peace accord “are accepted by Israel.”
“What does that say to you?” asked Berman, a commercial real estate developer in Atlanta. “It says they can stop when they get their state. He’s condoning terror as a means of obtaining the objective of a Palestinian state.”
Carter, who has criticized the current Bush administration’s Mideast policies, has said he wanted the book to be provocative.
“If it provokes debate and assessment and disputes and arguments and maybe some action in the Middle East to get the peace process, which is now completely absent or dormant, rejuvenated, and brings peace ultimately to Israel, that’s what I want,” he said last month on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
He declined to comment about Thursday’s resignations.
The appointed Board of Councilors is not the Carter Center’s policymaking body, but a group of 200 mostly local Atlanta leaders who help promote the institution as an international leader in human rights and health issues. But the departure of 14 of its members, who called several news organizations to make their resignation public, served to keep the controversy alive.
