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Friday November 2, 2007

Book-tour film offers another view of Carter

by michael fox
correspondent

According to Jimmy Carter, extreme frustration provided the impetus for his 21st book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Not a single day of peace talks took place between Israel and the Palestinians in the first six years after Bill Clinton left office, he says with a mix of incredulity and anger in Jonathan Demme’s straightforward documentary “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains.” So essentially, the former president felt compelled to single-handedly push the issue into the national consciousness.

That same frustration likely drove him to give his tome an attention-grabbing title. But we get the sense, as “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains” follows the author on his book tour through the fall and winter of 2006-07, that Carter comes to regret his provocative choice. The media hones in on the controversy generated by Carter’s sensationalist use of the word “apartheid” and avoids deeper questions, and the urgency of the Israeli-Palestinian situation evaporates before our eyes.

Indeed, while Carter comes off as scornful of the Bush Administration and disappointed with the Israeli government, the film subtly holds two other semi-interested parties accountable for the sad state of affairs in the Mideast: a simplistic American media and an uninformed, apathetic American public.

“The issue isn’t debated here,” Carter laments at one stop. “It’s debated nonstop in Israel.”

The film, which opens Friday, Nov. 2, will likely not win back for Carter the affection of the Jewish establishment that spoke out against “Palestine.” But it does set the record a bit straighter by clarifying where he stands.

Carter points out that AIPAC’s clearly stated mission is to promote the policies of Israel — above all else, including peace — and wonders why anyone is confused about that. He condemns Palestinian terrorism repeatedly, but flatly asserts that only Israel is responsible for the lack of political progress.

Along those lines, Carter criticizes Israel for constructing the wall within Palestinian territory instead of on the border. It is designed to take land, not protect Israel, he maintains, and so he refuses to call it a security fence. Furthermore, he notes, it’s not high enough to stop a rocket, so it isn’t very good protection.

“The wall can’t stop terrorism,” he declares. “Peace can.”

The former president dismisses suggestions that he is anti-Israel, and the film backs him up with a sequence revisiting the events surrounding his negotiation of the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978.

As journalist Yaron Deckel tells Carter as they sit down for an interview in Los Angeles for Israel’s Channel 1, “You forever will be an important part of Israeli history.”

That doesn’t stop Deckel from asking hard questions nor Carter from pushing back against what he sees as misinterpretations or misrepresentations of what he wrote.

The same is true for his satellite interview with Al Jazeera, which follows on the heels of the Channel 1 chat. These dialogues with correspondents who knew the issue backward and forward cast into sharp relief the shallow, smiley-face exchanges that the likes of Terry Gross, Wolf Blitzer and Tavis Smiley have with Carter.

Carter’s talk at Brandeis comprises the juiciest section of “Man From Plains.” The filmmaker first visits Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who fruitlessly attempted to debate Carter. Dershowitz is presented as surprisingly fair; informed that somewhere Carter referred to “the so-called Holocaust,” he seeks out the video clip online to ascertain the exact context and wording, then dismisses the remark as an unfortunate choice of words devoid of any malevolent intent.

At Brandeis, Carter quickly has the students’ attention. He describes the pain of personal attacks that the book engendered against him and his family, and he encourages students to visit the West Bank for themselves and see what life is like for the Palestinians.

The most frustrating passage in the film is an evening meeting between Carter and the Board of Rabbis of Greater Phoenix following a book signing notable for the vociferous Jewish and Palestinian rallies outside.

We are primed for a lively give-and-take, but the rabbis declined to give permission to be included in the film. Demme uses this ill-advised decision to make them look bad, but more importantly viewers are deprived of a conversation between Carter and a group of American Jewish leaders.

In the end, it is moments like these that stick with us, and not the endless planes, cars, makeup artists and TV hosts. Jimmy Carter desperately wants the United States to wake up and resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and he can barely get a serious discussion started.

No wonder that, at 83, the man still actively joins in the home-building projects of Habitat for Humanity.

Pounding nails is a great way to deal with frustration.

“Jimmy Carter Man From Plains” opens Friday, Nov. 2 at the Clay in San Francisco and the Shattuck in Berkeley.

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