Max Boot manages the nice feat of getting two things wrong in a single blog post. First, he snidely refers to Jimmy Carter as a "peacemaker extraordinaire (at least in his own mind)". Well, if Carter's peacemaker image is in his mind, then the rest of the world must be telepathic. The 1978 Camp David Accords overseen by Carter directly led to the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel the following year--a treaty that, for all its flaws, has prevented war between the two countries for 30 years.
Boot is also wrong in his more substantive claim that "if Carter is to believed, Hamas is happy to set itself on an entirely different course–if only Israel and the United States would engage in direct negotiations with it. This is the kind of thing that, well, only Jimmy Carter could possibly believe."
Well Jimmy carter and most of Israel, but who's counting? 64 percent of Israelis say the government should host one-on-one talks with Hamas, according to a June poll in Ha'aretz. Since it's unlikely that 64 percent of Israelis would want to negotiate with an implacable terrorist group devoted to their destruction, I think it's fair to assume that most Israelis have, like TAP's Gershom Gorenberg, concluded that Hamas is more flexible than its charter would seem to indicate.
--Jordan Michael Smith
