Former President Jimmy Carter's new book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" takes dead aim at what is the most pressing international affairs and national security issue of our times, the Israeli-Palestinian problem.

		Dan Simpson, a retired U.S. ambassador, is a Post-Gazette associate editor (dsimpson@post-gazette.com).

What he has to say on the subject, based on 33 years of experience and personal knowledge of all of the main personalities involved, is striking, sometimes even shocking, to those who don't know the region and the issues, and it is unsparing in its criticism.

He speaks candidly of the failures of the Israelis, the Palestinians and the Americans to address the problem with seriousness of attention and good faith, particularly over the past six years of the Bush administration.

He makes it clear that the U.S. ignoring of the issue, and the explicit and implicit U.S. condoning of Israel's policies toward the Palestinians, are largely responsible for the low favor in which the United States is currently held in the Middle East. (He could have added, in the whole Muslim world.)

Jimmy Carter brings to the table unique credibility. At 82 he has lived a long time and seen a lot. He sits there with his snow-white hair and clear eyes, with a little smile on his face that says, "I am going to pitch you, but I'm willing to talk." And you know that this is a proud man whose greatest achievement, having risen from Georgia peanut farmer to president of the United States, was rejected by the American people in refusing him a second term in favor of Ronald Reagan in 1980.

I met him once, in 1995, in Nairobi, Kenya, when I was U.S. ambassador and special envoy to Somalia. I was asked to brief him on Somalia, then, as now, at war.

Mr. and Mrs. Carter -- his wife, Rosalynn, accompanies him virtually everywhere -- asked good, sharp questions about Somalia. Most were focused on three points. The first was what the Somalis were fighting about. The second was whether I had any bright ideas about how to bring the conflict to an end. The third was whether I thought there was any useful role that he or his Carter Center could play in ending the Somali struggle.

I loved the way both of them listened to my answers, frequently not the case with celebrities. I was mesmerized by his clear, bright attention. I was, of course, flattered that a former U.S. president was interested in what I thought about what was then my issue.

It is doubtful that either the Israelis or the Bush administration will appreciate the cold light that Mr. Carter in his book casts on what Israel has done and is doing, and on what the Bush administration has condoned and abetted on the part of the Israelis. The Palestinians collectively come out as deeply wronged, but also maladroit almost to the point of stupid in misplaying their hand. However, the Palestinians also emerge from the book as principally wronged by the Israelis, backed by the Americans.

The word "apartheid," with its associations with the racism of the old South Africa, will provoke more Israeli attention and fury than it should, although that may have been Mr. Carter's intention in so titling the book. He makes it clear that white South African apartheid against that country's blacks and what the Israelis are doing to the Palestinians are not exactly the same, although one element is common to both -- the unjust allocation of land.

White South Africans sought to confine the country's blacks to the worst land with the fewest resources. The Israelis have created settlements and sequestered water resources, measures that serve the same purpose -- the impoverishment and disempowerment of the Palestinians in what is supposed to be their own land in the West Bank.

Mr. Carter, with his rich biblical background as a Baptist Sunday school teacher and deep attachment to humanitarian principles, manifested in all of the causes Mrs. Carter and he have fought for since he left the presidency in 1981, is more understanding and tolerant of what the Israelis do and why than he is of American presidents and governments who have abdicated America's unique capacity to act on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

He, of course, brokered the Camp David Accords of 1978 that laid down a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt that has lasted to this day. He was able to bring together Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, two very tough negotiators, to bring that off. He describes them euphemistically as "personally incompatible," and he had to keep them apart to get the agreement in a 10-day personal effort.

Of presidents since, he saw President Ronald Reagan as not particularly interested in the issue. Possibly to the annoyance of the current president, he notes the guts of President George H. W. Bush in threatening to withhold part of Israel's $10 million-a-day in U.S. aid plus loan guarantees to obtain a freeze on housing construction in Israel's settlements on Palestinian land. He notes Bill Clinton's efforts to move the ball forward -- the summit at Wye Plantation, for example -- but records no great successes.

Looking at the situation now, Mr. Carter sees a picture of Israel's having broken faith with previous commitments -- under U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and the Camp David Accords, for instance -- and trampling the Palestinians underfoot, in Gaza and particularly in the West Bank. He describes Israel's security fence as more appropriately called an "imprisonment wall."

Mr. Carter's toughest criticism, obviously enhanced by what he considers to be the appropriate role of an American president in the Israeli-Palestinian affair, is directed at the current Bush administration. It refuses to talk to Hamas and its leaders, in spite of that party's having won the January 2006 Palestinian elections, which the Carter Center observed. It supplied Israel arms and blocked U.N. efforts to obtain a ceasefire in this summer's 34-day Israeli-Hezbollah war in Lebanon. It puts no pressure on Israel on its wall or its settlements, continuing to send $3 billion a year in U.S. aid without conditions.

Mr. Carter doesn't like at all what his clear eyes see on this issue. It is useful for the rest of us to look at this critical question through those eyes, too.