212 W. Cold Spring Lane Baltimore, MD 21210 Phone: (410)235-5354 Fax: (410)235-8050

"WALDEN PONDERINGS"

I've been pondering headlines. First we have "Couple Stuck for 3 Days After GPS Leads Them Astray." Then we have "Former President Carter Apologizes to Jews." Now what, you may ask, does one have to do with the other? In the first case the story explains that a Nevada couple, who let their SUV's navigation system guide them through the high desert of Eastern Oregon, got stuck in the snow for three days when the GPS unit sent them down a remote forest road. Which bring us to the second case in which Jimmy Carter's internal GPS sent him down a remote path of terminal bewilderment that dead-ended with the writing of a book entitled "Palestine-Peace Not Apartheid."

In his recent apology the 39th President of the United States said that he was offering an Al Het, a plea for forgiveness for any words or deeds that may have upset the Jewish community. In a letter first sent to JTA, a wire service for Jewish newspapers, he wrote that "We must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel." And he added, "As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so."

He was a day late and a dollar short.

Even though the apology was accepted by Abraham Waxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League and a critic of Carter's views on Israel, I can't help but wonder what took the former president so long to come to his senses if, in fact, he has. Waxman said that when a former president asks for forgiveness, "it is incumbent of us to accept it." Then, he added, "To what extend this is an epiphany, only time will tell." Mr. Waxman will, I fear, have a long wait.

Carter's comparison of Israel's treatment of the Arabs on the West Bank and in Gaza with the institutionalized and codified practice of racial separation in South Africa was, at best, a flight of fancy and, at worst, nothing short of slanderous nonsense. His book was a poorly conceived and foolishly constructed valedictory to a failed presidency the legacy of which was an economy out of control with double-digit inflation, and the 444 day Iran hostage crisis that ended only when Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as his successor and the theocrats in Tehran concluded that he, Reagan, was someone they would rather not confront.

I spent a fair amount of time with Jimmy Carter and his minions when he was in the White House. To me he always seemed overwhelmed by the events taking place around him; even those in which he was directly and actively involved. In 1979 I was with him in Israel where what were called the "Camp David Accords" led to the signing of a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Menachem Begin, the old Irgun bomb-thrower, and Anwar Sadat, who had launched the disastrous Yom Kippur War against Israel only six years earlier, shared the Nobel Peace Prize shortly thereafter. (The treaty rang hollow just a few years later when Sadat was assassinated by military zealots outraged by his willingness to make peace with a sworn enemy.) Carter won the Nobel Prize as well, in 2002. It was awarded to him for, in the words of the proclamation, "his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development." And, in a recent appearance at Emory University he said that if he had one more day as president he would use it "bring peace to Israel and its neighbors. He still doesn't understand, nor do many others, that no outside influence can achieve that goal: that only Israel and its neighbors can bring peace to the Middle East and only when those "neighbors," all of them, are willing to accept Israel's right to exist…..and stop shooting, bombing, and hating.

I concluded, long ago, that Jimmy Carter lives in a world that never existed except in his own imagination. It's not that he's stupid. No one who graduated from the Naval Academy, helped Admiral Hyman Rickover in the development of the nuclear submarine, was elected Governor of Georgia, then President of the United States could be that. But he is curiously naïve and more than a little foolish. On the other hand not so naïve or foolish that he didn't time his apology to the Jews to follow, by just a few weeks, his grandson Jason Carter's announcement of plans to run for a Georgia senate seat in a district with a large and vocal Jewish population. Coincidence? I think not.

Shalom,

Alan Walden

Comments or questions? Contact the webmaster.