Early in Jimmy Carter’s latest book, the asyntactically titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, there comes a passage that inadvertently reveals much about the mindset of the author. In it, Carter is relating a conversation he had during a 1973 visit to Israel with then-Foreign Minister Abba Eban. Eban, a polyglot scholar of the Arab world and among the wisest of Israeli statesmen, tells the future president that while he has doubts about the Israeli presence in Gaza and the West Bank, the underlying cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far larger. Ultimately, Eban says, Jews and Arabs are incompatible and will have to be separated.

But Carter cannot be bothered to ponder the implications of Eban’s insight. Instead, he launches into a finger-wagging mini-lecture on Israel‘s “punitive” counterterrorism policies and the “quasi-colonial situation” that he believes exists in the territories. It’s an unmistakable warning that readers looking for a nuanced and evenhanded exegesis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should look elsewhere.

The remainder of Carter’s deeply flawed book bears out this conclusion. Carter’s mission in Palestine, a combination memoir and political treatise that summarizes his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from 1973 to the present day, is “to examine the root causes of the continuing conflict and to spell out the only clear path to permanent peace and justice in the Holy Land.” On both counts the book proves an abject failure.

The principal reason for this is that Carter is utterly incapable of empathizing with the Israeli perspective on the issues he considers. As much is apparent from the onset of his book. Describing a visit to Israeli kibbutzim in 1973, Carter asserts that Israel’s diversion of water from the Jordan river for the purposes of irrigation was “then one of the prime causes of animosity between Israel and its eastern neighbors.” If Carter is aware that Israel’s Arab neighbors had never acquiesced in its existence and had waged three wars to destroy the Jewish state prior to 1973, with another war to come later that year, he shows no evidence of it.

Indeed, the long history of Arab aggression is largely absent from this book. In Carter‘s judgment, the conflict can be distilled to two things: “land and Palestinian rights.” Israelis are illegally occupying the former and suppressing the latter. Therefore, once Israel withdraws from the territories and grants Palestinian Arabs more political autonomy, peace will come to the promised land. Conflict resolved.

This is hardly a novel argument, and Carter’s exposition of it does nothing to add to its persuasiveness. From a technical standpoint, it is not at all clear that Israel’s occupation is in fact illegal. Carter’s sole basis for this claim is United Nations’ Resolution 242. Drafted in the wake of the 1967 war, the resolution calls on Arab states to recognize Israel’s right to exist in peace within secure boundaries and requires Israel to withdraw from all or some of the territories captured in the course of the fighting, depending on how one interprets the wording.

As Carter tells it, the resolution has been approved by all sides. That is not the full story, however. While it’s technically true that Arab states accepted the resolution, they have consistently failed to honor it in practice. Even Egypt, whose peace treaty with Israel is the one notable accomplishment of Carter’s otherwise hapless administration, continued to war against Israel after nominally agreeing to the resolution‘s terms.

A further complication for Carter’s argument is that Israel has long disputed that the resolution requires a complete withdrawal from the territories to 1967 boundaries. Whatever the merits of that argument, the reality, as Carter cannot be unaware, is that not even the most concessionist Israeli government will now withdraw to the pre-‘67 frontier.

Yet, routinely throughout this book Carter suggests that any Israeli presence in the West Bank or Gaza is a violation of international law and a form of “colonization.” Carter’s inflammatory use of “apartheid” to describe conditions in Israel-occupied territory does nothing to illuminate the issue, since, as he himself acknowledges, the situation is “unlike that in South Africa -- not racism but the acquisition of land.” Invoking “apartheid” thus becomes a way for Carter to score a cheap rhetorical point against Israel, a cynicism on display throughout the book.

It is far from clear, furthermore, that an end to the Israeli occupation would mean peace. On the contrary, Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 has only increased terrorist violence. In order to account for this inconvenient fact, Carter resorts to decrying the manner in which the withdrawal was implemented. Noting that per capita income in Gaza has dropped by 40 percent in the last three years, Carter bluntly asserts: “This was the impact of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal.” Never mind that the differing dates belie the allegation. More problematic is that Carter refuses to consider the possibility that factors other than alleged Israeli misrule can explain the Palestinians’ woes.

Far more than Israeli policies, though, what has hurt the Palestinian economy is widespread financial mismanagement and corruption. It is useful to remember that Carter’s ally Yasir Arafat was famously one of the most corrupt men in the Middle East, pocketing over a billion dollars for his personal use and providing his Paris-ensconced wife Suha with a $100,000-per-month allowance, even as living conditions in the territories deteriorated to Third World levels. Other factors include internecine violence between rival Palestinian factions, the ruinous rule of nepotistic clans, and a poisoned culture that glorifies murder and anti-Semitism.

Reading Carter’s book, however, one would get the impression that the Palestinians’ problems begin and end in Jerusalem. In this connection, it is telling that Carter, assiduously nonjudgmental when discussing the Palestinians, is harshly critical of all things Israeli. He is constantly outraged at “extreme Israeli spokesmen,” “extremely militant Jews,” and Israel‘s “militant policy.” Even Israeli domestic debates are too “vitriolic” for his delicate sensibilities. For Carter, Israel can do no right.

By contrast, Arab leaders are virtually blameless. To read Carter’s reminiscences of his travels throughout the Arab world is to understand why, as he put in an earlier book, he was “always greeted with smiles and friendship.” Carter allocates no fewer than six pages to the views of his friend Hafez al-Assad, the late Syrian tyrant, on the pretext that “these are rarely heard in the Western world.” If this is indeed true, one reason may be that Assad’s views -- not least his claim that “racist” Israel started the 1967 war in order to annex Arab land -- are ahistorical propaganda, something that would be apparent to any discerning reader.

Not only does Carter not challenge Assad’s claims, but he reproduces without comment his worthless assurance that Syria is committed to “Lebanon’s independence without equivocation.” Anyone unfamiliar with Syria’s brutal occupation of its Lebanese neighbor would thus be surprised when Carter later reports that the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559 has now required Syrian troops to be withdrawn from Lebanon. But if Syria was as committed to Lebanon’s independence as Assad insisted in 1977, what were Syrian troops still doing there in 2004? Carter supplies no clarification. The closest he comes to acknowledging Syria’s occupation -- a word he reserves for Israel -- is to note nebulously that assassinated Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri was “a strong critic of Syrian decisions concerning Lebanon.” Which “decisions” these might be Carter declines to say.

Larger still is the ideological blind spot Carter carries for Saudi Arabia. Of the leading sponsor of Wahhabi terrorism, Carter insists that “it’s stabilizing role has always been crucial.” Amazingly, Carter’s sole criticism of the kingdom is to chide the late King Khalid for the allegedly “time-consuming” extent to which he devoted himself to the concerns of his Saudi subjects. Carter then credulously records the absolute monarch’s reply that “the kingdom could not survive if its leaders abandoned this commitment of personal service to their people.” Thus is a bloated despotism transformed into a Wal-Mart with wadis. If the evidence wasn’t on the page, you wouldn’t think even Jimmy Carter capable of such sycophancy. The only time Carter mentions the subject of human rights, meanwhile, is in disparaging “American political leaders” for overlooking their abuse, a complaint that is conspicuously at odds with the comprehensively flattering portrait Carter has rendered of life inside the kingdom.

Those who recall Carter’s enthusiastic support for Yasir Arafat will not be shocked to learn that he has had no second thoughts about the terrorist chieftain. While Israeli leaders are uniformly presented as dour ideologues, Arafat is “surprisingly friendly,” even if his willingness to acknowledge Israel’s existence is only “equivocal.” Not to worry: As always with Arab leaders, Carter is eager to give him the benefit of the doubt. To that purpose, he excerpts a PLO pamphlet, personally gifted him by Arafat, that presents the PLO as a nationalist movement. “It is interesting how many times ‘national’ appears in this short statement,” Carter observes. To a less admiring reader, though, what is really interesting is the pamphlet’s reference to the PLO’s “struggle for usurped homeland,” a veiled allusion to the destruction of Israel that Carter chooses to ignore.

It is on Arafat’s behalf that Carter makes arguably the most outrageous claim of his book, in which he exonerates the Palestinian leader of any responsibility for the failure of the Camp David summit of 2000. Incredibly, Carter dismisses the demonstrable fact that Israel made an extremely generous offer to Arafat -- including 97 percent of the post-1967 territories, Palestinian control over East Jerusalem and compensation for Palestinian refugees. “The fact is that no such offer was ever made,” Carter writes, a claim that puts him at loggerheads with both President Clinton and his ambassador Dennis Ross, who oversaw the negotiations. Unsurprisingly, Ross has emerged as a leading critic of Carter’s book.

It’s dismaying to see a president of the United States reduced to the role of court stenographer for Arab dictators, even if it does remind one why Carter enjoyed the former distinction so briefly. A no less troubling feature of Palestine -- and one should alarm Carter’s defenders -- is his reluctance unequivocally to condemn Palestinian terrorism.

Carter’s protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, the cumulative impression conveyed by his book is that he considers it a misguided tactic that ill-serves the Palestinian cause. He has already apologized for the most notorious instance of this formulation -- he writes in the book that Palestinians should abandon terrorism “when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel,” as if it were appropriate until such time -- calling it “stupid,” and promising to alter it in later editions.

Unfortunately, there are countless other instances. In condemning a March 1996 terrorism attack that killed 37 Israelis, Carter seems mainly concerned that it helped the campaign of the “hawkish” Binyamin Netanyahu. Elsewhere, in a rare attempt at broadmindedness, Carter writes: “It should be noted that by following policies of confrontation and inflexibility [i.e., terrorism and a refusal to recognize Israel’s existence], Palestinians have alienated moderate leaders in Israel and America and have not regained any of their territory or other basic rights.” The ugly implication of such logic is that if terrorism had paid political dividends, its use by Palestinians would be unobjectionable.

Just as startling is Carter’s observation that “It would be tragedy -- especially for the Palestinians -- if Hamas decided to promote or condone terrorism.” Setting aside the fact that terrorism is Hamas’s raison d'etre, why should it be tragic “especially” for Palestinians, rather than, say, their Israeli victims? It’s hard to say whether Carter commits such deplorable sentences because he is simply a careless writer, which he is, or because he is so enamored of the Palestinian cause that he believes noble ends justify murderous means. Whatever the case, it is no credit to the self-styled peacemaker.

Apart from the tendentiousness of its argument, Palestine suffers from its relentlessly one-sided bias. Neither footnotes nor a bibliography are featured in the book, and on the infrequent occasions when Carter mentions a source, it is inevitably a pro-Palestinian organization. Typical is Carter’s casual admission that his “primary contact” for information about the mistreatment of Palestinians is the Orient House, which happens to be the PLO’s headquarters in East Jerusalem. As such, it has a political interest in emphasizing the struggles of Palestinians while downplaying Israeli concerns about security.

Relying solely on such politically motivated sources might be forgivable in a propagandist, but Carter affects to be an impartial mediator. Proclaiming that Israel’s “control and colonization of Palestinian land” have been the “primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land,” Carter declares: “No objective person could personally observe existing conditions in the West Bank and dispute these statements.”

This claim is, of course, absurd. One can acknowledge the suffering of Palestinian Arabs while doubting both that Israel is their primary cause and that further Israeli concessions are sufficient for a peace settlement. For his part, Carter simply cannot recognize that, as Abba Eban told him all those years ago, the conflict goes beyond Israeli policies. The possibility that Palestinian terrorists do not simply react to provocation but seek the destruction of the Jewish people and their national home; that the Arab and Muslim world has never reconciled itself to Israel’s existence; that Israel, in the face of existential threats, has done as well as any democratic country can to balance security needs with the foundations of a free society -- in this broader context Carter shows no interest. By and large, facts that do not fit into his pro-Palestinian narrative do not exist.

A memorable illustration of this closed-mindedness comes when Carter recalls a 1983 meeting, as a representative of his Carter Center, with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Having clashed with Begin during his time in office, Carter goes back to business as usual. He charges that Israel has violated U.N. Resolution 242 and reproaches Begin that his country is the main obstacle to peace in the troubled region. Instead of engaging Carter as he had in the past, however, Begin “responded with just a few words in a surprisingly perfunctory manner,” and made it “clear that our conversation should be concluded.” Carter, with a characteristic lack of self-awareness, professes puzzlement: Who wouldn’t want to hear his views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? He never suggests an answer, but it’s really quite obvious. Begin appreciated what Carter’s publishers still do not. On the subject of the Middle East, Carter does not merit as serious hearing.