Regarding Jimmy Carter, Haaretz put it best in an editorial a few months ago:

"Whether Carter's approach to conflict resolution is considered by the Israeli government as appropriate or defeatist, no one can take away from the former U.S. president his international standing, nor the fact that he brought Israel and Egypt to a signed peace that has since held. Carter's method, which says that it is necessary to talk with every one, has still not proven to be any less successful than the method that calls for boycotts and air strikes. In terms of results, at the end of the day, Carter beats out any of those who ostracize him. For the peace agreement with Egypt, he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life."

If you want to see real "leverage" over the government of Israel then lobby hard for the USA to stop sending them billions of dollars. Stop all military assistance, information sharing and actually put people in jail if we catch them spying on us for the state of Israel.

On a related note; President Carter has been my favorite president during my lifetime and he continues to be a great man. However, we did not archive peace 30 years ago and the Israel government has sanctioned the theft of most of Palestine since then. Simply getting Israel to agree to stop further takings is not enough.

The solution is to declare all of Palestine one state and decree that one-man-one-vote democracy is the path. That plus the rule of law would be perfect. Then the people whose land was stolen by Europeans pretending to be 'returning home' could be compensated.

If you can not support that plan; you don't like democracy plus the rule of law.

When this deal successfully completes, the Proof of Concept that diplomacy can work will be there for anyone to examine. If the right lessons are drawn there is hope for the future.

The sliming of Jimmy Carter by the right is one of the most disgusting indicators of the way they think. He is ten times the man of ANY republican ex-president.

I am going to call my senators this morning and let them know that I strongly support Obama's Mideast strategy.

Can we begin to hope that there might finally be some progress on this issue?

Without belittling Carter's tireless efforts to keep the negotiations on track, it was Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin who made up their minds to even pursue an agreement.

There will be a provocation and a reaction, then a massive retaliation. Afterwards the usual finger-pointing and one-sided

blame laying. Then they will say that the abused party did it to themselves. Watch and see.

I guess the point you're trying to make is that all sides have to be willing to negotiate. True!

Without belittling Carter's tireless efforts to keep the negotiations on track, it was Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin who made up their minds to even pursue an agreement.

No doubt. As Macgupta said, it takes the willingness and commitment of all parties to make that happen. Still, Carter was instrumental, and it's pretty amazing and revealing to watch neocons constantly slime a person who did as much for Israel's security as any other single human being.

JonathaninTelAviv seems to gratuitously minimize the role of mediators in settling disputes. While it is undoubtedly true that mediators generally cannot produce results without the willing participation of the principals, it is also true that many resolutions would not occur but for the work of the mediator. This was certainly the case at Camp David.

Carter took extraordinary personal political risks in mediating the Egypt-Israel dispute, and at a time when he and the country were facing numerous pressing challenges. The fact is that Carter prevented the negotiations from collapsing on more than one occasion.

The irony of it all is that removing the Egyptian army from the chess board, which Carter did, has also removed all constraints from the empire builders in Israel. It is inconceivable, with the threat looming on their other border, that Israel would be making an almost-annual event of incursions into Lebanon, Gaza, etc. They're the only major military power left in the neighborhood, and has Carter gotten the eternal thanks of the Israelis for this accomplishment, which got him no votes in the US? Well, no.

Remember this?

The United States will not change its policy towards Hamas, despite a letter which will be passed to the new American president requesting that he engage the group in dialogue, Senator John Kerry said on Saturday.

"[The letter] doesn't change our policy in not dealing with terrorists," Kerry said during an interview with Channel 2. "We will deal with the Palestinian Authority government, with [PA President Mahmoud Abbas], and [PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayad]."

Hamas official Ahmed Yousef on Saturday said he wrote a letter to US President Barack Obama, which was received by Kerry during his visit to Gaza.

The letter was given to UN officials who passed it to the US senator during a one-day visit to Gaza on Thursday.

Yousef said that the letter was endorsed by the Hamas government.

The letter calls on Obama "to deal in a fair way with the Palestinian issue," he said, noting that many Palestinians believe that US foreign policy is biased in Israel's favor.

I does take--at a minimum--two parties to broker a fair, just and sustainable peace. But while we are patting Jimmy Carter on the back (deservedly so), let's not forget who has actually been doing the "reaching out" here. It has not been, imo, the US, and it certainly has not been the Israelis, who remain frozen in position. The Israeli negotiating position remains absurd, while the US is not initiating contact with Hamas, but rather responding to contact from Hamas.

The most movement towards negotiation has in fact been from Hamas, the evil, democratically-elected, terrorist organization.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull&cid=1233304838221

Who really knows if Carter had noble intentions, was concerned about his "legacy" or was just banging heads together for other, more overtly political, reasons?

Certainly nobody here knows Carter well enough to make a personal judgement, but we do know he was as friendly with and reliant on Brzezinski and Rockefeller as any Republican thug. So the empire wears a pretty face now and again?

"Big Deal!", but hardly a new deal ...