Thursday, 4:30 PM
Carter invite fizzles
By Farah Stockman and Marcella Bombardieri, Globe Staff
It seemed like a good idea: Have former President Jimmy Carter come to Brandeis University to talk about his controversial new book, "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid."
But the idea ended -- as many things on Carter’s tumultuous nationwide book tour have -- in disagreement and controversy.
Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz said he agreed with a trustee’s suggestion to invite Carter last month, if Carter were willing to debate one of his most outspoken critics, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.
Carter, president from 1977-1981, rejected the idea. To Carter, the episode was proof that many in the United States were unwilling to hear an alternative view on what he says is the most taboo foreign-policy issue in the United States -- Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.
But others say it shows Carter himself is unwilling to debate his own best -- selling book, which has sparked allegations of errors and omissions, charges of anti-Israeli bias, and protesters at his book signings.
"President Carter said he wrote the book because he wanted to encourage more debate. Then why won’t he debate?" Dershowitz said.
Carter, who brokered the 1978 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, has said the goal of the book -- including its provocative title -- was to provoke dialogue and action.
"There is no debate in America about anything that would be critical of Israel," he said in an interview Wednesday night.
But a furor has erupted because of the use of the word apartheid, which seems to equate the oppression of Palestinians with that endured by black South Africans under that country’s now-defunct system of state -- mandated racial segregation.
Carter said: "Apartheid is the forced separation of two peoples in the same area and the forced subjugation of one to the other. No one can argue that that is not the situation in the Palestinian territories right now."
Others have praised the 39th president for raising important questions about the cost of the United States' unwavering support for Israel.
The effort to bring Carter to Brandeis began Nov. 14, when computer science professor Harry Mairson sent Carter a letter asking whether he would be interested in coming to talk. Mairson called the letter a "feeler," not an invitation.
Before accepting, Carter called his longtime friend and former adviser, Stuart Eizenstat, a member of Brandeis’s Board of Trustees, for advice. Eizenstat said he advised Carter not to accept because he did not know whether the professor had an agenda.
A member of Carter’s staff later asked whether Reinharz could extend an invitation, and Eizenstat said he approached Reinharz with an idea: invite Carter to debate Dershowitz, who had recently reviewed Carter’s book and who had previously expressed a desire to debate Carter several times.
Reinharz thought the debate was "a terrific idea," he said in a telephone interview.
Carter, however, was stunned by the proposal.
"I don’t want to have a conversation even indirectly with Dershowitz," Carter said. ‘‘There is no need to for me to debate somebody who, in my opinion, knows nothing about the situation in Palestine."
Mairson received a written reply, dated Nov. 17, from Carter’s appointment secretary, saying that he would not visit the campus.
