Former President Jimmy Carter: Gaza Situation 'Intolerable'

[Purveyor]

Source: Associated Press

May 2, 2015 | Updated: May 2, 2015 1:34pm

JERUSALEM (AP) — Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter said Saturday that eight months after a bloody war in the Gaza Strip the situation there remains "intolerable."

Carter and his delegation were supposed to visit the isolated territory but earlier this week called it off siting unspecified security concerns. Speaking to reporters in Jerusalem, Carter said he was still determined to work for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.

"What we have seen and heard only strengthens our determination to work for peace," he said. "The situation in Gaza is intolerable. Eight months after a devastating war, not one destroyed house has been rebuilt and people cannot live with the respect and dignity they deserve."

More than 2,000 Palestinians were killed in the 50-day summer war between Israeli forces and Hamas militants who fired rockets into Israel.

Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/world/article/Former-President-Jimmy-Carter-Gaza-situation-6238229.php

[Comrade Grumpy]

1. Thank you for speaking out, Mr. Carter.

[billhicks76]

21. What About Hillary?

She going to do anything about it?

[RobertEarl]

39. She was SoS

I'm sure she did something.

Had it been me I'd have told Israel they had to buy their own missiles, that the US would no longer give them any money for weapons and that sanctions would be forthcoming if Israel diverted any US aid to weapons.

But that's just me, because I am more like Carter, I suppose.

[oberliner]

55. Israel uses most of the money the US gives them to buy US weapons

In fact, that is written into the agreements.

The whole thing is a way to get more money into the US defense industry.

[hack89]

2. I suspect the tunnels were Hamas' first priority.

I am certain they will move on to rebuilding houses any day now.

[Comrade Grumpy]

3. Of course you do. n/t

[hack89]

4. Do you really think Hamas has delayed rebuilding their military infrastructure?

there Is certainly enough Arab news coverage that says otherwise.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

6. With Gaza acting like a concentration camp,

Can any rational person blame them? Oh, wait, I used the word rational.

[hack89]

7. So you agree with tunnels before houses?

do you think the people of Gaza were given a choice? Do you think the international donors expected their money to be diverted?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

8. Your name suits your argument.

[hack89]

10. International donors are reluctant to give Hamas money

because they know the money will be diverted. Seems pretty straight forward why Gaza is not being rebuilt. What us your theory?

[oberliner]

12. You seriously think Gaza is like a concentration camp?

Can you really mean that?

[daleanime]

14. You prefer the phrase....

concentration district?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

15. Concentration zone. Or,

Concentration region. Much more polite for those too sensitive to deal with facts. Especially unpleasant ones.

[daleanime]

17. Ah...Thanks. I wouldn't want to cause anyone....

to suffer uncomfortable feels. Those of us who are reality impaired need to be protected from these demon facts.

[former9thward]

23. Is the West Bank a concentration camp?

I don't think the people there would say that. They are economically prosperous. They want statehood but the place is not the wreck Gaza is. What is the difference?

[Igel]

35. It sort of it and it sort of isn't.

Parts of it are just populated by residents.

Parts of it are "refugee camps." They were set up in '48 and upheld by the Egyptians. The locals don't want them abolished any more than the locals in the West Bank or Syria or Lebanon do. They learned the lesson from Jordan. The refugee camps and permanent inherited refugee status are both exceptional and very useful--too useful to let them just dissolve through population movement.

Think of it as an indigenous kind of thing. Ghettos are very Mediterranean, with identity-specific quarters or wards in which you were expected to live and uphold, to some extent, your own identity-internal rules and regulations out of sight of those who have other rules and rulers. If your population increased, your quarter became more densely populated. Since there were often walls around the quarters, they were ghettos, as much as the ghettos in Italy or Poland were ghettos. (A lot of Americans forget that "ghetto" is an Italian word for a part of Italian life.)

[Scootaloo]

20. He's right, Hamas' priority was their own infrastructure

What hack misses - what Hack always has missed nd i suspect always will mis - is that hamas' wrongdoing does not excuse nor justify the abuse of the people of Gaza

[hack89]

22. That is the problem with democratically elected governments

The people do bear some responsibility for what is done in their name. They choose Hamas therefore they support Hamas's actions. They are not bystanders.

[Scootaloo]

24. Oh, is that so?

Alright. So becuase Palestinians gave hamas a slim parliamentary margin in 2005 and have not had election since, then they deserve this:


Then by the same logic, Israelis, who vote regularly and have a far more responsive government, have more than earned this:


At least, in Hackistan, this is the case.

In reality, the targeting of civilians is a war crime, precidely because civilians are NOT responsible for the actions of their governments, even in a democracy - collective punishment of citizens takes into no account opponents of the ruling regime, it does not account for the possibility (or probability) that the government simpoly does as it pleases over the wishes of its people, and targeting civilians does not have any actual impact on the decisions made by hteir government.

Try again.

[hack89]

25. Using your own people as shields from behind which you wage war is also a war crime

Hamas needs to stop waging wars it can't win. The solution is not complicated.

[Scootaloo]

26. Israel needs to stop using dynamite to fight gophers

[hack89]

28. 51 tunnels dug into Israel is a hell of a gopher problem

especially now that we appreciate how hard and destructive it is to eradicate those tunnels.

[Scootaloo]

29. And I'm sure bombing the shit out of Rafah and Khan Younis' apartment complexes helps lots

[hack89]

30. Start a serious war in a confined area and bad shit happens

one day they will stop shooting rockets, sending suicide bombers and digging tunnels into Israel. Then things will get better.

[Scootaloo]

33. You're arguing against your own logic

You believe that people in a democracy deserve to die for the actions their government takes. How the fuck is it that you believe Israeli men, women, and children should be exempt from this rule of yours?

If your rule is the rule, they shouldn't be. Every Israeli torn apart by a suicide bomber deserved it. Every israeli hit by a rocket had it coming. Abducted into a tunnel/ well, it's Likud's fault. even if you voted for Meretz.

This is your argument. it's a shitty argument, and it has no basis in reality, and serves only for you to try to justify your awful position... but that's your argument.

Live with it.

And yes, Gaza is a confined area. it's a patch of coastal desert the size of Manhattan or so, with a population of two million people. There is little potable water - the water treatment plant in Gaza was bombed "by accident." There is little electricity, since the power plant was also bombed "accidentally." Homelessness is soaring, because of all the homes and apartments bombed completely by accident. Unemployment is over 60%. Most of the population is under the age of 30. These people have been blockaded on three sides by a nation that conducts all these bombings, with the fourth side controlled by an equally hostile, and treaty-obligated nation.

But you think dropping huge incendiary devices into these peoples' neighborhoods is excused by calling the people killed by those devices 'human shields."

[hack89]

34. Who said they were exempt?

they just happen to have a government that can protect them and doesn't start needless wars that endanger them. They also have a government that is actually held accountable for needlessly getting their constituents killed.

[Joe Chi Minh]

37. ... and abducting Jews to face who knows what manner of death?

[rainy]

51. The only reason Hamas was elected

was because the previous moderate leaders the Palestinians chose were inefective and ignored by Isreal who continued to defy sanctions and steal land creating a power void for the Palestinians. Hamas promised to fill that void and to protect them and their land and so desperate people do desperate things and Hamas was elected to stop the land theft and to restore dignity to a people for whom all other efforts had failed. If only Isreal had respected the people and their moderate leaders they would not have elected Hamas in sheer desperation.
Isreal is led by right wing religious war mongers and land grabbing murderers. Thank god we do not judge the Jewish people by the leaders they choose.

[hack89]

52. The Palestinians elected a terrorist group as their leaders

a group with a long bloody history of attacks against Israeli civilians. A group dedicated to the eradication of Israel. So why is everyone surprised that things went from bad to worse?

[rainy]

53. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39448.htm

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article39448.htm
"Israel does not have a right of self-defence over territories it illegally occupies – it has an obligation to withdraw."
Yet, still we're fed the relentless myth that Israel left Gaza with 'benign intent', 'gifting all those greenhouses', all that 'goodwill infrastructure', to those 'thankless' Palestinians, who only went on to support Hamas and dig tunnels rather than 'use the opportunity' to turn the place into a 'Mediterranean paradise'.

As with Davies's indulgence of Peres, it's amazing how often this kind of crude propaganda is trotted-out without the mildest corrective from interviewers, or standard reminder that Gaza is subject to an illegal siege and ongoing state of occupation.

That's all routinely ignored in favour of the 'primary threat': those 'provocative' rockets from Hamas 'militants' - rather than Palestinian fighters - as 'impartially' labelled by the BBC.

There's little or no mention here that Hamas was originally supported by Israel as an expedient bulwark to Fatah. Forget, too, that Hamas has regularly intimated its approval of a 'two-state solution'. And, as Mondoweiss reminds us, while being denounced for rejecting an Egyptian-brokered truce in which they weren't even consulted, Hamas were, not for the first time, trying to construct a more durable one:

Much less noticed by the Western media was that Hamas and Islamic Jihad had meanwhile proposed a 10 year truce on the basis of 10 – very reasonable – conditions. While Israel was too busy preparing for the ground invasion, why didn’t anyone in the diplomatic community spend a word about this proposal? The question is all the more poignant as this proposal was in essence in line with what many international experts as well as the United Nations have asked for years now, and included some aspects that Israel had already considered as feasible requests in the past.

[hack89]

54. I am all for Israel withdrawing from the West Bank

Gaza is an harder issue. A unilateral lifting of the blockade is out of the question but a third party inspection regime to ensure Hamas cannot rearm with more powerful weapons is certainly a good idea - Gaza gets all the consumer goods they need and trust can be developed between the two sides.

[Jackpine Radical]

27. So--uh--

I'm responsible for America's wars since Vietnam? (Well, OK, I'm partly responsible for Vietnam; I allowed myself to be drafted.)

Here's what your logic says I'm responsible for:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_United_States

And frankly, I'm not sure how I will be able to handle the overwhelming burden of guilt for all that. To what extent can I count my efforts to protest these outrageous adventures as mitigation of my guilt?

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

5. I have great respect for President Carter...

...but how/why he refers to the wonton slaughter Israel has visited (multiple times) on the defenseless and imprisoned civilian population of Gaza as a "war" is very puzzling. I'll bet he wouldn't refer to the brutal treatment meted out to the defenseless Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto as a war.

Any longstanding one sided slaughter/displacement of one group by another much stronger should be called what it is -- genocide.

[ananda]

9. Maybe it's both: war and genocide.

In any case, it must be considered a great good
that Carter is speaking of it.

[forest444]

11. It probably has to do with media bias,

which by and large is so shamelessly one-sided in favor of the Israeli point of view that even scholars and human rights activists find themselves avoiding "offensive" terms like genocide and repeating media tropes about this being a "war" (implying, as you pointed out, that both sides are at least comparably matched in both power and brutality).

[oberliner]

13. You think the situation in Gaza is similar to the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto?

Can you actually mean that?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

16. It is heading in that direction.

If you refuse to face facts, then the blood of thousands, likely more, is on your hands.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

32. I can, and I'd say there are similarities as well as...

...dissimilarities. For example I don't think the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto (and I don't mean in any way to
diminish the horrors of starvation and/or never knowing when you might be dragged out into the street and shot) were ever bombed with white phosphorous (a clear war crime) as Gazans were in 2009:

What white phosphorous does to the human body isn't pretty, but US citizens should see the barbarity they're sponsoring:

The most prominent similarity is obviously the completely defenseless civilian populations being slowly starved to death.

Come back with the standard MSM rockets and tunnels mythology if you like, but in the absence of a credible evidential trail supporting these claims (I've yet to see one), I'm inclined to dismiss them as little more than IDF propaganda.

[ellenrr]

41. Mr. Jefferson, excellent answer, how in hell have you lasted here??

beware. the haters will try to get rid of you.

[ellenrr]

40. too true, Mr. Jefferson, I hate when people refer to it as a war...but

that is part of the tyranny of language. It is deliberate.

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

48. Yes it absolutely is part of the tyranny of language.

That's a good way to put it, and it is our duty to expose it.

And thank you for the compliment above Ellen.

[Rolando]

18. AP reporting

Doesn't AP know that there is a difference between "siting" and "citing"? How can we take reporting seriously if the language is flawed? I'm really tired of ignorance.

[red dog 1]

19. I think Carter is the most unappreciated President in modern history

and he probably would have won reelection in 1980 if Reagan's "kitchen cabinet" hadn't resorted to treason and sabotage in order to defeat him.
(Google "Denategate" and "October Surprise&quot

[libdem4life]

31. Which "Gaza"...the one in the Middle East, or the one in Baltimore..hard to tell the difference.

Thank you President Carter for, yet again, saying and doing what is possible to move humanity along in being more human. I do believe he was the greatest President we've had...maybe ever. His compassion and intelligence and unwillingness to let the Beltway influence him was likely the reason he did not get elected for a second term.

He was truly a Peacemaker.

[ellenrr]

42. I think Carter - since he left the position of president - has come out with

a true representation of Gaza.
it is unfortunate when we lionize someone just for telling the truth.
that is setting a low bar.
yet I share your admiration for him for this.
as far as "the greatest president ever", well...maybe if you compare him to the stinkers we've had..
but a 'great man', if you said that I would disagree:

During his presidency, Carter proclaimed human rights to be "the soul of our foreign policy." Although many journalists promoted that image, the reality was quite different.
Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia’s December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered.
Elsewhere, despotic allies — from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran — received support from President Carter.
In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala — again contrary to enduring myth — major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended.

http://fair.org/media-beat-column/jimmy-carter-and-human-rights-behind-the-media-myth/

[libdem4life]

43. At the risk of sounding like a "Purist", could you suggest another?

You do, of course, understand that Presidents have little power, especially where the "Defense Department" is concerned. It is a federal bureaucracy that remains pretty much intact as Presidents come and go. There have been something like 120 incursions since the Civil War. Don't have the list on this browser, but trust me, it exists.

Thank you for sharing.

[ellenrr]

44. you mean suggest anther "great president"?

I guess FDR was a good one.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about presidents.
I'd rather think about movements.
I think change comes from the ground up.

[libdem4life]

45. I was responding to your answer that Carter apparently didn't qualify based on the wars

during his administration.

That was why the "120 incursions since the Civil War" info kind of suggests that they all have found reason...for ill or for "good"...to spread democracy at the point of the gun.


Here it is ... http://academic.evergreen.edu/g/grossmaz/interventions.html

[ellenrr]

46. oh - I agree with you on that point... nt

[libdem4life]

47. I kind of thought so.

[Joe Chi Minh]

36. The Jewish leaders wouldn't see him. I used to admire Carter. Not now. I like him,

because I think he's got a good heart. But Israel is doing what it has to, in order to survive. Here is an interesting video:

http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/why-the-un-banned-this-video/

The Pope commends the UN for its official role in international affairs, but the Jewish lad shows that it has been falling far short of its intended aims.

[MisterP]

38. acting in ways that Apartheid's architects call "going too kankerlijk far" is not "surviving"

[moondust]

49. "60 Minutes" did a segment on the IP war today.

The imbalance in the deaths and destruction is staggering. More than 500 Palestinian children killed while something like 3 Israeli children killed. The future could see even more tension as 40% of the Palestinian population is under 18 and growing up with this crap, many with PTSD. Without jobs or economic opportunity, some join terror groups because they pay.

[oberliner]

56. What was the ratio of Afghani children killed to US children killed in that conflict?

Pretty sure there were quite a sizable number of Afghani children killed in US and coalition airstrikes.

[moondust]

58. And one thing they may have in common:

U.S.-made and/or U.S.-financed weapons systems.

[ellenrr]

50. Carter refuses to meet with Netanyahu; says the latter is "not committed to peace"

"Former US President Jimmy Carter had harsh words for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Saturday, saying a meeting with him would be a "waste of time."

Carter is in the midst of a three-day visit to Israel working to bring about a two-state solution. He met with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah on Saturday, but did not meet with Netanyahu or President Reuven Rivlin."

"The [Elders Group] stands for peace and human rights, and if human rights and peace are not on Netanyahu's agenda, I understand why he does not want to meet us," Carter charged.

Earlier on Saturday, Carter urged Palestinian Arabs to hold elections to end the rapidly growing fierce enmity between Hamas in Gaza and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority (PA) in Judea and Samaria.

During the Channel Two interview, Carter maintained his stance that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, adding that Hamas politburo chief Khaled Mashaal is "strongly in favor of the peace process."

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/194895#.VUcycY5Vikr

---Pretty bold statements and action by Carter.

[Sunlei]

57. so when is Jordan and Egypt going to help with their Palestinian next door neighbors?

anything? couple miles of that unused desert land for expansion towards Jordan and Egypt? Come on Jordan and Egypt, it's been a thousand years.

[Kingofalldems]

59. Israeli soldiers say permissive rules of engagement fueled Gaza carnage.

Looks like war crimes from here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/israeli-veterans-say-permissive-rules-of-engagement-fueled-gaza-carnage/2015/05/04/ab698d16-f020-11e4-8050-839e9234b303_story.html?postshare=8751430762704315