Jimmy Carter’s Difficulty With Numbers

Being a nuclear engineer may not have the same caché as a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon, but the assumption is that if you are a nuclear engineer, you have a facility with numbers that the rest of us do not have.

This assumption seems justified, unless of course the nuclear engineer in question is former president Jimmy Carter and he is writing about the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian violence over the past decade. Then it’s a pretty good idea not to rely too heavily on the former president’s math skills.

In his most recent book We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work, Carter substantially discounts the number of Israeli deaths at the hands of Palestinians since 2000.

On page 62 Carter writes:

During the Second Intifada and before a Gaza truce was accepted in June 2008, reliable human rights organizations reported that 334 Israeli military personnel and 719 Israeli civilians were killed. [The total is 1053 Israelis.] There were 4,745 Palestinian fatalities …

Then on page 94, Carter writes:

B’tselem reports 1,787 Palestinians killed in the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces and 41 by Israeli settlers between September 2000 and 2008. Qassam rockets were launched from Gaza into the nearby Israeli village of Sderot, and retaliatory strokes against Gaza cost 2,974 lives, while 580 Israelis were killed.

The problem with these numbers is obvious. While the number of Palestinian deaths is about the same (4,745 on page 62 versus 4802 on page 94), there is a significant discrepancy between the Israeli deaths (1053 on page 62 and 580 on page 94). Why the 45 percent drop in the number of deaths?

An examination of B’tselem’s website reveals the problem. The 580 figure Carter used on page 94 includes only Israelis killed inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders and omits Israelis killed in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. This glaring error removes almost 500 Israeli deaths from Carter’s narrative.

The problems with Carter’s statistics do not end here. On page 132, Carter reports that “from November 2000 to mid-2004 nearly four hundred Israeli soldiers and citizens were killed.” In fact, more than twice this number of Israelis were killed over the time frame Carter enunciates.

According to a report published by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center (IICC), 879 Israelis were killed in the years 2001, 2002, and 2003. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 28 Israelis were killed in the last two months of 2000, and 63 were killed in the first six months of 2004, yielding a total number of 970 Israeli deaths – far exceeding Carter’s estimate of 400 killed.

Former President Carter does not seem to have any problems accurately recounting the number of Palestinian deaths, but does seem to have a problem documenting the number of Israeli deaths in his text.