Fourteen members of an advisory board to the Carter Center in Atlanta resigned Thursday in protest over former President Jimmy Carter’s best-selling new book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, saying they could “no longer in good conscience continue to serve.”
The resignations were the latest episode in an escalating controversy over the book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” published in November. It has been criticized within the U.S. Jewish community as tilting sharply toward the Palestinians. Scholars have found fault with his fact-checking. At least one former Mideast negotiator has expressed outrage over what he called “misrepresented” history.
The straw that broke board member Steve Berman’s back, he said Thursday, appeared on Page 213, in a passage he quoted from memory: It was imperative, Carter wrote, that Arabs and Palestinians “make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals” of an internationally proposed peace accord “are accepted by Israel.”
“What does that say to you?” asked Berman, a commercial real estate developer in Atlanta. “It says they can stop when they get their state. He’s condoning terror as a means of obtaining the objective of a Palestinian state.”
Carter has said he wanted the book to be provocative, but he declined comment about Thursday’s resignations.
In a statement from the Carter Center’s press office, Executive Director John Hardman emphasized that the advisory board was “not engaged in implementing work of the center and are not a governing board.”
The appointed Board of Councilors is not the center’s policymaking body, but a group of 200 mostly Atlanta leaders who help promote the institution as an international leader in human rights and health issues.
Word of the 14 resignations first appeared Thursday on The Wall Street Journal’s Web site.
Berman, who emerged as the resignation campaign spokesman, answered one question before it was asked. “It’s fair to say,” he said in an interview, that “most” of the people he contacted about the book were Jewish, as were the signatories of the resignation letter. “But that wasn’t a subject that came up in our discussion.”
He and the others who signed Thursday’s letter say Carter went too far. “The thing that really disenchanted all of us–it broke our hearts–was to see the president abandon his traditional position of mediator, promoter of peace and honest broker [to become] an advocate for one side of the conflict.”
