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There are no photographs among the pages of PALESTINE: PEACE NOT APARTHEID. You can't skim through Jimmy Carter's clear, concisely crafted prose about the festering sore of a land some still call holy and see the former 39th American president poised at hopeful moments in history with a Who's Who of Middle Eastern politicians. In fact, such photos would have been blatant lies.
Carter's book is not about posturing, posing, name-dropping or appearances for the media, but looks instead behind the scenes at scores of characters --- perpetrators, victims, brokers, provocateurs, altruists, diplomats, tyrants, mediators, exploiters --- whose tangled agendas have resulted in decades' worth of grinding, thankless hard work with no apparent end in sight. Instead of pictures, PALESTINE: PEACE NOT APARTHEID is eloquently illustrated by maps, whose ragged contours show the tortuous history of this land up to the present day.
The most telling and sadly persistent map of all is the last, entitled "Palestinians Surrounded 2006." On it, the eye can travel over the roughly bean-shaped area of the West Bank and see the devastation wreaked on a subjugated nation and culture, not over centuries or decades, but in the historical nanosecond of events since 2000.
Running distinctly inside the dotted line of the officially accepted boundary between Palestinian and Israeli territory is a crude solid black line, indicating vast completed stretches of Israel's notorious Security Wall. It is this obscene multibillion-dollar structure --- pictured on the book's dust jacket up against the author's noticeably averted eyes --- that has given rise to increasing international use of the apt adjective "apartheid" to describe the overall policy of Israel's government and military authorities toward the Palestinian people.
The Wall's black outline traces a drunken path that repeatedly veers away from the Israel-West Bank border to bite even more deeply into Palestinian land, lurching around illegal Israeli settlements that never should have been built, but that remain imprinted in their dozens like a stubborn rash on the page.
If one were to imaginatively zoom down into the mapped bird's-eye view of this continuing conflictual disaster, the footprint of the Wall would suddenly take on the true contours of human despair that Carter describes in memorably uncompromising words. Its hideous height and breadth separates an entire people from their collective birthright; families from generations-old olive groves, orchards, fields, homes and pastures; able men and women from meaningful work; businesses from their markets; children from the hope of education; the sick and injured from medical care; and relatives from traditional familial contact.
And as if that isn't enough to evoke utter despair for any progress toward peace-with-justice, another feature of Carter's final map is a broad dark-shaded band that runs the length of the natural border formed by the Jordan River and western shoreline of the Dead Sea. It is called on the legend "Areas of Planned Israeli Settlement Control" and creeps like a spreading cancer eastward, covering about one-third of the entire West Bank area. Make no mistake; Israel's idea of "control" is not the prevention of illegal settlements, but their enabling and enforced protection.
In essence, every printed page of PALESTINE: PEACE NOT APARTHEID is the story of its last map. It is a story whose individual events, breakthroughs, disappointments, betrayals (of which there are many) and one-on-one human encounters are made relentlessly absorbing in Carter's modest yet firmly convinced timbre.
The pieces and pawns of this sordid game, in which Carter continues to strive for substance over promise and justice over containment, are carefully and accurately laid out with surprising even-handedness. All sides are exposed in the harsh light of their various virtues and vices, but with the overall caveat that those with the greatest power must shoulder a proportionally greater responsibility for rectifying a shameful chapter in human history. Only then can the ongoing cycle of Israeli-Palestinian violence and oppression be broken and the resulting pieces mended into something far better for all who believe in this wounded land as their rightful home.
--- Reviewed by Pauline Finch (paulinefinch@rogers.com)
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