USA | PALESTINE

Rest in Peace, President Jimmy Carter

Carter’s passage is the reminder that international law and human rights, as Carter understood them, were buried long before him.

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Jimmy Carter was the first US president I knew by name.

I was four years old when Sadat visited Jerusalem. For days on end, I despaired for anyone’s attention as the whole family huddled around the black-and-white TV set, transfixed at the live speeches. Later, when I overheard that President Carter was to drive through Ramallah, I waited by the window all day in hope of catching a glimpse of the motorcade.

Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, and my book Fugitive Dreams (Photo by the author)

So I wrote in Fugitive Dreams, published a mere two years ago.

Since becoming aware of the world, I heard talk of ‘salam’ — “peace”.

And here we are, Carter lived into old age and died, while the peace morphed into walls and concentration camps and genocide.

There are others more qualified than I to write Carter’s obituary.

What I feel like writing today is an obituary to PEACE –

• The peace that’s negotiated with a colonial power that murders and robs and expels
• The peace that comes only when the oppressor agrees
• The peace that enshrines apartheid and inequality.

That is not my peace.

Let that peace rest in pieces for ever and ever …

Carter’s passage is the reminder that international law and human rights, as Carter understood them, were buried long before him.