In his speech today at the Israel Project, Ambassador Dan Gillerman
said that Jimmy Carter was a "bigot" who had gone to the Middle East
with "soiled hands and came back with bloody hands," because he had
shaken hands with Hamas leader Khaled Meshal.
Sitting in the audience, I felt some anger on behalf of my former pres-
ident, and marveled that the Israeli Ambassador could dismiss a man
of Carter's stature in such raw terms, in the U.S. Scholar Jerry Slater
offers something of an explanation in his critique of the coverage
of the Carter trip in Tuesday's NY Times:
The story relates Jimmy Carter's upbeat assessment of the chances
for peace agreements between Israel and both Hamas and Syria.
After relating Carter's view, Ethan Bronner adds: "But Khaled
Meshal, the Hamas leader with whom Mr. Carter met in Damascus,
gave a televised news conference late Monday in which he seemed
to contradict Mr. Carter’s statements. “Hamas accepts the establish-
ment of an independent Palestinian state ON THE 1967 BORDERS
WITH EAST JERUSALEM AS ITS CAPITAL,and with full and real
sovereignty and full application of the right of the Palestinian
refugees to return..."
This direct quote from Meshal is very significant, and completely
consistent with what Carter said. I have emphasized the key points:
that Meshal is saying that Hamas in practice will accept a TWO-state
solution--i.e. it is not demanding the destruction of Israel--and its
capital will be EAST Jerusalem, not all of Jerusalem.
In the past two years Hamas has made many such non-fanatical
statements that clearly open the door for exploratory negotiations,
all of which have been rejected out of hand by the U.S.and Israeli
governments. That kind of mindless stupidity is what we have
come to expect from the U.S. and Israelis governments--but
does the Times have to mimic them?
