Teepen: What is Carter thinking when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian issue?

It is becoming difficult not to suspect that former President Jimmy Carter has gone a bit ding-a-ling about the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

In his 2006 book "Peace Not Apartheid," Carter not only grotesquely equated Israel with racist South Africa but also — after three wars, two bloody uprisings and countless terror attacks launched against Israel — pinned the blame for continued tension and violence on Israel alone: "Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law..."

Now Carter has emerged from his freelance talks with the leadership of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist outfit that controls Gaza, trumpeting a characterization of the talks so askew it had to have been purposely misleading in its claim of progress and promise.

The former president briefly created a great stir when he declared that Hamas had agreed to the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel if the proposal was approved in a Palestinian referendum, with terrorist Hamas consequently recognizing Israel.

This was quickly hailed as the breakthrough that the world's naifs have been insisting was just waiting to happen if someone would only talk to Hamas. Carter implied that Hamas had agreed to leave the Palestinian Authority, controlled by Hamas's rival Fatah, unmolested to negotiate a deal with Israel if it could.

Offended by thus being slandered as potentially peaceable, Hamas hurriedly clarified Carter's take on the meeting – in fact, clarified it to death.

Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader with whom Carter had met, specified that first Hamas and Fatah would have to settle their differences, a tall order right there. And to be acceptable any deal with Israel would have to re-establish the 1967 borders, site the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem and include a full right of return for Palestinian refugees.

Each of those is a killer condition. Israel won't cede the strategic defensive positions it captured in 1967's Six Day War. (Though it has offered to trade equivalent territory.) A Jerusalem capital is possible, but Palestinians have always insisted upon an unrealistically expansive definition of East Jerusalem. And it would be national suicide for Israel to take in Palestinian refugees who, after three generations of population growth, now number 4.5 million.

And, oh, yes: One more thing. No matter what, Hamas, Meshal said, still wouldn't recognize Israel's right to exist and wouldn't give up its pledge to destroy it.

In short, Carter got bupkis.

Carter said, too, that Syrian leaders, with whom he also met, were eager for a full peace treaty with Israel, and on that point the former president is right to scold the Bush administration for refusing to talk with Syria, as it also has refused to talk to Iran.

The Syrian feeler, if it is really that, deserves to be tested. In seven years, Bush and his foreign policy team haven't moved U.S. interests forward even an inch by refusing to talk to Iran and Syria until, in effect, they have agreed in advance to concessions that ought to be the objective of negotiations, not precursors to them.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn AT earthlink.net.