What Would Jimmy Do?
PALESTINE PEACE NOT APARTHEID
By Jimmy Carter
Simon & Schuster. 264 pp. $27
Jimmy Carter tells a strange and revealing story near the beginning of his latest book, the sensationally titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. It is a story that suggests that the former president's hostility to Israel is, to borrow a term, faith-based.
On his first visit to the Jewish state in the early 1970s, Carter, who was then still the governor of Georgia, met with Prime Minister Golda Meir, who asked Carter to share his observations about his visit. Such a mistake she never made.
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Conflict in the Bone
Interview with Jeffrey Goldberg
Rare is the book that keeps me thinking long after I've finished the last page, especially when the book is not a ponderous philosophical tome but a vivid page turner. I was well aware of Jeffrey Goldberg's narrative tricks in his memoir Prisoners: A Muslim and a Jew Across the Middle East Divide from the first line which sucked me in with intimations of a kidnapping then dropped me just before the climax into a leisurely narrative of his childhood. Okay, fine, he can tell a story.
But what kept revolving around my head long after I'd worked out the plot (it's a memoir, so, you know, he survives) was just how close to the surface his emotions are from start to finish. Which is not to say that he's scared. Goldberg styles himself a tough guy (he shrugs off his captivity with a boast about having once talked his way past a hostile check point in the Congo), so we don't see a lot of fear here. What's on display, in fact, is an emotion much less acceptable in polite circles: his yearning for physical power, summed up in the worldview of his thirteen-year-old self as "Jews with guns."
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