On Monday, the New York Times published a characteristically invidious column by former president Jimmy Carter calling on his lame-duck successor, Barack Obama, to recognize a Palestinian state. Intelligent observers have already picked apart the article itself, which has plenty to say about Israeli settlements—most of which is wrong, misleading, or vicious, but makes no mention of Palestinian terrorism, how Hamas and Fatah will work out their differences, how this new state will be ruled, or how it will be prevented from ending up like Syria, Libya, or Iraq. But it’s worth taking a moment to consider the graphics provided by the Times. I don’t know what the thinking was behind them but, as the saying goes, “a picture’s worth a thousand words.”
The main image, at least on the online version of the piece, is an artist’s rendering of a mother bird (a dove?) perched on her nest, extending a green (olive?) branch to what are presumably her two chicks, one slightly larger than the other. Some simple digital wizardry shows the baby birds—who are looking up expectantly at their mother—snapping their beaks in alternation. The image rests, for some incomprehensible reason, on a garish hot-pink background. When I first saw it, I got the message it was meant to convey—”peace”—and moved on. But then I looked again, and realized it more or less sums up a principal reason why, aside from his trademark animus against Israel, everything about Carter’s argument is wrong.
If you take the image seriously, it’s clear that the mother bird is America, the larger chick Israel, and the smaller one the Palestinians. In other words, the two parties to the conflict are helpless infants—unable to fly—who need an attentive America to feed them peace. Such is the attitude not only of Carter but of much U.S. policy over the past half century, with Barack Obama being one of the worst offenders. Israel needs America to force it, like an uncooperative child, to act in its own (supposed) best interests by taking the “tough steps” for peace. And the helpless Palestinians need their “mother” to gift-wrap statehood for them. (Much of the Israeli left, not to mention the American Jewish left, seem to agree.)
And then there’s the second graphic, appearing on the left-hand side of the page. It’s a photo of Menachem Begin exchanging an awkward embrace with Anwar Sadat at Camp David. Carter stands to the side, foolish grin on his face, clapping. This image quite nicely captures how the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty—the agreement whose “spirit”, Carter now laments, is in danger of being lost—came to be in the first place. Sadat and Begin laid the groundwork for peace behind Carter’s back, in no small part because Sadat wanted to be spared Carter’s ill-conceived attempts at international arm-twisting. Only afterward were the Americans invited to help work through the details. In other words: Sadat and Begin made peace; Carter applauded from the sidelines.
And there, between the computer-generated image of how Carter and Obama see peacemaking, and the photograph of how peacemaking actually happened, you have it. Right now, Israel has little motivation for negotiating with Palestinian leaders who would be happy to take territorial concessions but have no interest in peace—or even, I suspect, in statehood. Nor, right now, does Mahmoud Abbas have any incentive for establishing a Palestinian state at peace with Israel. Absent Israel’s “occupation forces,” who would keep him from being assassinated by Hamas? And what would become of the gravy train of international aid that keeps him and his associates wealthy?
As Efraim Karsh and Michael Doran have argued, in different ways, in recent books, America has much less power to shape the Middle East than its presidents usually assume; and the Middle East is filled not with helpless hatchlings but with actors who have often successfully persisted in carrying out their chosen policies despite the misperceptions and mischief-making of their putative mentors and betters. Neither the current president, nor the next, nor the U.N. Security Council, can force-feed peace. Until Palestinian leaders are willing, such efforts are bound to fail.
Andrew N. Koss is a historian and the associate editor of Mosaic.
