Is it possible that the miserable war in Lebanon and the endless slaughter in Gaza are an outcome of the lack of willingness to talk with our neighbors? When was the last time we tried to talk to the Palestinians about their future and about our future? When was the last time we sent out probes to the Lebanese about signing a peace agreement with them? When was the last time we tried to renew the truncated negotiations with the Syrians about the possibility of arriving at a peace agreement?

For six years now Israeli politics has been at a standstill. Ever since prime minister Ehud Barak shoved Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat into the lodge at Camp David in July 2000, there has been no serious contact between an Israeli leader and an Arab leader with whom we are in conflict. The result is dreadful. Israel has slammed doors on its neighbors and has made up its mind to set arrangements on its own, in dialogue with itself, while ignoring its neighbors as though it were a lone juniper tree in the desert. It is possible that for this insult, we are now paying the price.

To a large extent both the slaughter in Gaza after the disengagement and the war in Lebanon prove the failure of the unilateral approach. How is it possible, asks every reasonable individual, that we pulled out of Lebanon and they are attacking us? How is it possible, asks every reasonable individual, that we pulled out of Gaza and they are still attacking us? Is it any wonder that the lack of gratitude on both these fronts has led many Israelis to the conclusion that hatred for Jews is imprinted in the Muslim genome and that the urge to go to war is imprinted in the Arab character?

And perhaps this outburst of aggression has its source in our egotistic nature, in our refusal to relate to our neighbors, in our unwillingness to see them from the distance of a meter. There is no such thing as unilateral peace, just as there is no such thing as unilateral war. It takes two to dance the dance of death, and to dance the dance of joy. We have decided to dance with ourselves, as though the Arabs were shapeless, transparent and not worth speaking to.

And it isn't as though in the past there haven't been bilateral contacts that aroused hope. However, they can be counted on one hand. Only two months ago a cheerful meeting was held between our new prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and King Abdullah of Jordan. How many smiles they scattered, and how many times they clapped one another on the shoulder. Olmert was at his best. He laughed, he joked, he chummed and he demonstrated impressive communications skills. He spoke with everyone - apart from the only person at that meeting who justified a serious discussion. And indeed, Olmert's aides worked for days so that their boss would not shake the hand of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.

These are the achievements of Israeli diplomacy vis-a-vis the Palestinians during the past six years: Ehud Barak pushed Arafat at Camp David, the same Barak invited Arafat to dinner at his home, prime minister Ariel Sharon invited Abbas to a meeting at the Prime Minister's Residence, Olmert bestowed a hug on Abbas. Two gestures, one conversation and one dinner party during the course of six whole years. Not a bad output for a country mired in a bloody conflict with the Palestinian people.

And during this entire time, Israel has withdrawn into itself, refusing to look sideways. It exited Lebanon in anger and it exited in similar anger from the Gaza Strip, without having attempted to coordinate the moves with those concerned. It is also planning to exit the West Bank with a similar, unilateral slam of the door.

Instead of speaking with our enemies we speak with our friends, not to say our patrons, the Americans, as though we were lowly vassals. We have adopted English almost as a mother tongue and we relate to Arabic as almost an existential threat. Thus far, the subordination of our lives, our values and our future to the Americans has not proved itself. We have never been as insecure as we are today. As part of our despair we are surrounding ourselves with a wall and turning the symbol of national rebirth into a fortified Jewish ghetto closed on all sides.

If the despair with our neighbors and with peace spreads, the Israelis are liable to deposit the reins of the state in the hands of dangerous fanatics like Yisrael Beiteinu MK Avigdor Lieberman. "For insane situations, you need insane people in charge," said an inhabitant of Kiryat Shmona last week who thus reflected the new mood and mentioned Lieberman as a wonder drug.

If Olmert does not hold out any hope soon and does not start talking with the Lebanese and the Palestinians and the Syrians, the despair is liable to push the Israelis toward extreme solutions.

Carter: Under all of its predecessors there was a commitment to peace instead of preemptive war. Our country always had a policy of not going to war unless our own security was directly threatened and now we have a new policy of going to war on a preemptive basis. Another very serious departure from past policies is the separation of church and state, which I describe in the book. This has been a policy since the time of Thomas Jefferson and my own religious beliefs are compatible with this. The other principle that I described in the book is basic justice. We've never had an administration before that so overtly and clearly and consistently passed tax reform bills that were uniquely targeted to benefit the richest people in our country at the expense or the detriment of the working families of America.

SPIEGEL: You also mentioned the hatred for the United States throughout the Arab world which has ensued as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Given this circumstance, does it come as any surprise that Washington's call for democracy in the Middle East has been discredited?

Carter: No, as a matter of fact, the concerns I exposed have gotten even worse now with the United States supporting and encouraging Israel in its unjustified attack on Lebanon.

SPIEGEL: But wasn't Israel the first to get attacked?

Carter: I don't think that Israel has any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon. What happened is that Israel is holding almost 10,000 prisoners, so when the militants in Lebanon or in Gaza take one or two soldiers, Israel looks upon this as a justification for an attack on the civilian population of Lebanon and Gaza. I do not think that's justified, no.

SPIEGEL: Do you think the United States is still an important factor in securing a peaceful solution to the Middle East crisis?

Carter: Yes, as a matter of fact as you know ever since Israel has been a nation the United States has provided the leadership. Every president down to the ages has done this in a fairly balanced way, including George Bush senior, Gerald Ford, and others including myself and Bill Clinton. This administration has not attempted at all in the last six years to negotiate or attempt to negotiate a settlement between Israel and any of its neighbors or the Palestinians.

SPIEGEL: What makes you personally so optimistic about the effectiveness of diplomacy? You are, so to speak, the father of Camp David negotiations.

Carter: When I became president we had had four terrible wars between the Arabs and Israelis (behind us). And I under great difficulty, particularly because Menachim Begin was elected, decided to try negotiation and it worked and we have a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt for 27 years that has never been violated. You never can be certain in advance that negotiations on difficult circumstances will be successful, but you can be certain in advance if you don't negotiate that your problem is going to continue and maybe even get worse.

SPIEGEL: But negotiations failed to prevent the burning of Beirut and bombardment of Haifa.

Carter: I'm distressed. But I think that the proposals that have been made in the last few days by the (Lebanese) Prime Minister (Fuoad) Siniora are quite reasonable. And I think they should declare an immediate cease-fire on both sides, Hezbollah said they would comply, I hope Israel will comply, and then do the long, slow, tedious negotiation that is necessary to stabilize the northern border of Israel completely. There has to be some exchange of prisoners. There have been successful exchanges of prisoners between Israel and the Palestinians in the past and that's something that can be done right now.

SPIEGEL: Should there be an international peacekeeping force along the Lebanese-Israeli border?

Carter: Yes.

SPIEGEL: And can you imagine Germans soldiers taking part?

Carter: Yes, I can imagine Germans taking part.

SPIEGEL: ... even with their history?

Carter: Yes. That would be certainly satisfactory to me personally, and I think most people believe that enough time has passed so that historical facts can be ignored.

SPIEGEL: One main points of your book is the rather strange coalition between Christian fundamentalists and the Republican Party. How can such a coalition of the pious lead to moral catastrophes like the Iraqi prison scandal in Abu Ghraib and torture in Guantanamo?

Carter: The fundamentalists believe they have a unique relationship with God, and that they and their ideas are God's ideas and God's premises on the particular issue. Therefore, by definition since they are speaking for God anyone who disagrees with them is inherently wrong. And the next step is: Those who disagree with them are inherently inferior, and in extreme cases -- as is the case with some fundamentalists around the world -- it makes your opponents sub-humans, so that their lives are not significant. Another thing is that a fundamentalist can't bring himself or herself to negotiate with people who disagree with them because the negotiating process itself is an indication of implied equality. And so this administration, for instance, has a policy of just refusing to talk to someone who is in strong disagreement with them -- which is also a radical departure from past history. So these are the kinds of things that cause me concern. And, of course, fundamentalists don't believe they can make mistakes, so when we permit the torture of prisoners in Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, it's just impossible for a fundamentalist to admit that a mistake was made.

SPIEGEL: So how does this proximity to Christian fundamentalism manifest itself politically?

Carter: Unfortunately, after Sept., there was an outburst in America of intense suffering and patriotism, and the Bush administration was very shrewd and effective in painting anyone who disagreed with the policies as unpatriotic or even traitorous. For three years, I'd say, the major news media in our country were complicit in this subservience to the Bush administration out of fear that they would be accused of being disloyal. I think in the last six months or so some of the media have now begun to be critical. But it's a long time coming.

SPIEGEL: Take your fellow Democrat Senator Hillary Clinton. These days she is demanding the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But she, like many others, allowed President Bush to invade Iraq under a false pretext.

Carter: That's correct.

SPIEGEL: Was the whole country in danger of losing its core values?

Carter: For a while, yes. As you possibly know, historically, our country has had the capability of self-correcting our own mistakes. This applied to slavery in 1865, it applied to legal racial segregation a hundred years later or so. It applied to the Joe McCarthy era when anti-communism was in a fearsome phase in the country like terrorism now. So we have an ability to correct ourselves and I believe that nowadays there is a self-correction taking place. In my opinion the election results in Connecticut (Eds: The primary loss of war supporter Senator Joseph Lieberman) were an indication that Americans realized very clearly that we made a mistake in going into Iraq and staying there too long.

SPIEGEL: Now even President Bush appears to have learned something from the catastrophe in Iraq. During his second term he has taken a more multilateral approach and has seemed to return to international cooperation.

Carter: I think the administration learned a lesson, but I don't see any indication that the administration would ever admit that it did make a mistake and needed to learn a lesson. I haven't seen much indication, by the way, of your premise that this administration is now reconciling itself to other countries. I think that at this moment the United States and Israel probably stand more alone than our country has in generations.

SPIEGEL: You've written about your meeting with Fidel Castro. He appears seriously ill now and Cuban exiles are partying already in the streets of Miami. You are probably not in the mood to join them.

Carter: No, that's true. Just because someone is ill I don't think there should be a celebration of potential death. And my own belief is that Fidel Castro will recover. He is two years younger than I am, so he's not beyond hope.

SPIEGEL: You sought to normalize relations with Castro, but that never happened. Has anything been achieved through Cuba's isolation?

Carter: In my opinion, the embargo strengthens Castro and perpetuates communism in Cuba. A maximum degree of trade, tourism, commerce, visitation between our country and Cuba would bring an earlier end to Castro's regime.

SPIEGEL: You've been called the moral conscience of your country. How do you look at it yourself? Are you an outsider in American politics these days or do you represent a political demographic that could maybe elect the next US president?

Carter: I think I represent the vast majority of Democrats in this country. I think there is a substantial portion of American people that completely agree with me. I can't say a majority because we have fragmented portions in our country and divisions concerning gun control and the death penalty and abortion and gay marriage.

SPIEGEL: As president, your performance was often criticized. But the work you did after leaving office to promote human rights has been widely praised. Has life been unfair to you?

Carter: I've been lucky in my life. Everything that I've done has brought great pleasure and gratification to me and my wife. I had four years in the White House -- it was not a failure. For someone to serve as president of the United States you can't say it is a political failure. And we have had the best years of our lives since we left the White House. We've had a very full life.

SPIEGEL: Do you feel you achieved even more out of office than you did as president?

Carter: Well, I've used the prestige and influence of having been a president of the United States as effectively as possible. And secondly, I've still been able to carry out my commitments to peace and human rights and environmental quality and freedom and democracy and so forth.

SPIEGEL: Does America need a regime change?

Carter: As I've said before, there is a self-corrective aspect to our country. And I think that the first step is going to be in the November election this year. This year, the Democrats have good chance of capturing one of the houses of Congress. I think the Senate is going to be a very close decision. My oldest son is running for the US Senate in the state of Nevada. And if just he and a few others can be successful then you have the US Senate in Democratic hands and that will make a profound and immediate difference.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Carter, thank you for the interview.

So why would it now agree to be disarmed and removed from all of southern Lebanon, the home of its own Shia supporters? Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, was quite frank: "As long as there is Israeli military movement, Israeli field aggression and Israeli soldiers occupying our land...it is our natural right to confront them, fight them, and defend our land, our homes and ourselves." Besides, the Israelis have now offered him an irresistibly tempting target.

Israel's assault on Hezbollah was as much a "war of choice" as the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh claims in this week's "New Yorker" that the Bush administration approved it in order to deprive Iran of a means of retaliation after U.S. air strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities, and the San Francisco Chronicle reports that a senior Israeli army officer made Power-Point presentations on the planned operation to selected Western audiences over a year ago.

"By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out," Professor Gerald Steinberg of Bar Ilan University told the Chronicle, "and in the last year or two it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."

Ehud Olmert was seduced by the plan because, lacking military experience himself, he needed the credibility that comes in Israel only from having led a successful military operation. Otherwise, he would lack support for his plan to impose unilateral borders in the occupied West Bank that would keep the major settlement blocks within Israel, while handing the rest to the Palestinians. So he seized on the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of three others by Hezbollah on 12 July, the latest in an endless string of back-and-forth attacks along the northern border, as the pretext for an all-out onslaught on the organization.

Olmert's lack of military experience also led him to trust the promises of General Dan Halutz, Israel's chief of staff, that Hezbollah's destruction could be accomplished mainly from the air, with Israeli ground troops only going in at the end to mop up. But Rule Number One for aspiring national leaders is: never believe air force promises.

Olmert launched his war, bombed lavishly all across Lebanon, pounded the south -- and a month later Hezbollah still controlled almost all the territory and was launching several hundred missiles a day at Israel. Time for a ceasefire -- but if he had no more than that to show for his war, he would be out of power very fast. So AFTER the UN resolution was passed on Friday, but BEFORE the ceasefire that formally took effect Monday morning, he launched an airborne invasion that scattered packets of Israeli troops all over southern Lebanon right up to the Litani.

Israel has not smashed the Hezbollah's strong-points in southern Lebanon and driven its fighters out. It has deposited its own troops among them checkerboard-fashion, in some cases without any ground line of supply, in order to claim that it now controls the region. And it is counting on the UN resolution decreeing the disarming and withdrawal of Hezbollah, and an eventual hand-over by Israel to the Lebanese army and foreign peacekeepers, to protect its soldiers from severe embarrassment. This is probably Olmert's last mistake.

It is hard to imagine that Hezbollah will resist the temptation to attack all the easy targets that Olmert has now given it in southern Lebanon. It is inconceivable that either the Lebanese army (itself mostly Shia) or the French and Italians (the core of the proposed peacekeeping force) will try to fight their way into southern Lebanon on Israel's behalf. There is the potential here for Israel's first serious operational defeat since the 1948 war.

That might be a blessing in disguise for Israel, if it persuaded enough Israeli voters that exclusive reliance on military force to smash and subdue their Arab neighbors is a political dead-end. There is little chance of that. The likeliest beneficiary of this mess is Israel's archetypal hard-liner, Binyamin Netanyahu, who flamboyantly quit the Likud Party last year in protest at former prime minister Ariel Sharon's policy of pulling out of the occupied Gaza Strip.

That split Likud and forced Sharon to launch a new party, Kadima, which now dominates the centre-right of Israeli politics and is the nucleus of Olmert's coalition government. But Kadima may not survive this disastrous war, and the heir apparent, at the head of a resurgent Likud, is Netanyahu. The last opinion poll in Israel gave him an approval rating of 58 percent.

Mossad is famous for past exploits, including the global campaign in the 1970s to track down and kill Palestinian terrorists in retaliation for the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Its specialty has been recruiting agents inside terrorist groups and using their information to effectively counter or limit attacks.

However, the recent fighting in southern Lebanon revealed major shortcomings in the agency's intelligence on the precise locations of Hezbollah leaders and rocket launchers, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"This was an intelligence failure, but not on the same scale as those of the United States prior to 9/11," said one U.S. official long involved in intelligence matters.

The U.S. official said Mossad's lack of intelligence about Hezbollah dates back to 1998, when the terrorist group began a strategy of conducting clandestine attacks while also seeking public support through charitable work and joining the political process in Lebanon.

The bias regarding Hezbollah's evolving nature had an effect on the activities of Israeli spies and agents in the field, which contributed to misperceptions about the group, the officials said.

Robert Baer, a former CIA operations officer who is familiar with Mossad, said the Israeli intelligence agency failed to gather good intelligence on Hezbollah, in stark contrast to its very successful efforts against Palestinian terrorists.

Israeli intelligence, mainly the Shin Bet domestic service, thoroughly penetrated many Palestinian terrorist groups. But Hezbollah employs extremely tight operational security to prevent penetration by Mossad or other intelligence services, Mr. Baer said.

Hezbollah operates its military and intelligence wings in utmost secrecy, and they are completely separate from the charitable and political wings, he said.

"Military-intelligence people do not talk to political leadership or rank-and-file people who do social work," he said.

Dennis Pluchinsky, a former State Department intelligence analyst, said Mossad may have been "counting on the Lebanese population and government to turn on Hezbollah."

Mr. Pluchinsky said the government in Beirut failed to take on the group, and there was a reluctance to "delegitimize Hezbollah."

"I do not believe that the fault lies with Israeli military strategic and tactical failures, as much as a political strategic failure," he said.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney said Mossad knew details three years ago about Hezbollah's Katyusha and other rockets.

"They knew what they had," he said.

He said Israel's war plan was undermined by political leaders, not by a lack of intelligence.

"Israel's plan was that if they were fired upon, they would respond with a [leadership] decapitation program and massive air and ground campaigns into Lebanon," Gen. McInerney said.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert did not order the decapitation plan and was slow to carry out the ground campaign.

"It was not the intelligence," he said. "There's no question they did not take the heart out of Hezbollah."

Although they are technically not intelligence components, Israeli special-operations commandos were effective in conducting covert attacks against Hezbollah leaders and fighters, but failed to kill or capture the group's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, mainly because of a lack of intelligence.

About 20 Hezbollah leaders were captured by Israeli commandos.

An Israeli air force officer told the Jerusalem Post that a lack of real-time intelligence hindered efforts to target Hezbollah leaders.

For example, Israel bombed a car last week in Lebanon that was thought to be carrying a senior Hezbollah leader. The bombing, however, killed three Lebanese soldiers.

In one air strike, the Israelis dropped 23 tons of bombs on a Beirut bunker thought to be a hide-out for Sheik Nasrallah and other Hezbollah leaders, but the leaders were not there.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declined to comment in a recent television interview on whether Mossad and the CIA failed to understand Hezbollah's military capability. However, she told the Fox News Channel that "if you think about how these terrorist organizations operate, they go in with the population, they hide their capabilities inside of villages. They're very hard to detect."

"I hugged and kissed the soldiers, since I know most of them well, and began to photograph. Suddenly, a major leapt out at me and told me, 'Stop shooting!' and began to choke me.

"Shortly thereafter, two more officers joined him - one was a lieutenant colonel and the other a colonel - and they all pushed me, tried to shove me to the floor and take my equipment. Eventually they succeeded," Kaminsky said.

After Kaminsky's equipment was confiscated, the soldiers showed him orders they had received apparently prohibiting civilians from entering the area.

"They showed it to me briefly. I barely got a glance at what was actually written in the orders," Kaminsky said.

He said there were three other photographers from foreign news agencies present at the time, and all of their cameras were taken as well. "Half an hour after they beat me, military police officers arrived and 40 minutes later we were all transported to the northern border road.

"There we met with a field security official. He took a look at the pictures left in the cameras and said to one of the battlion's officers, 'What do you want from them, anyway?'"

Kaminsky added that on his way to Zar'it he had crossed through a military checkpoint and no one had told him that he could not take pictures in the area.

"If the army did not want us to take pictures, all they had to do was ask us. Do you know how embarrassing it was to stand in front of members of my battalion and get beat up by the officers?"

An IDF spokesperson said in response that the IDF views seriously any use of force against journalists and members of the media.

"The event will be examined and dealt with. However, we call on the media and its representatives to respect the IDF's guidelines regarding areas that are designated as closed military zones," the spokesperson said.

Lebanese officials say the country's coastline was under threat from the worst ecological disaster in its history as a result of the Israeli airstrikes on the fuel installation. "The contamination that has accumulated, some of it on the seabed, is threatening animals such as turtles and tuna," the Lebanese environmental organization, Green Line, noted this week. "The beautiful white sands that we will need for tourism so that the country can recover have become toxic and useless."

Some 10,000 tons of fuel have leaked from the tank hit in the Israeli air strike; the spill initially stretched some 70 kilometers, but the latest figures from the United Nations speak of a 150-kilometer-long oil slick that is threatening the Syrian coast too.

The UN notes, too, that a change in weather conditions could see the spill move southward in the direction of the Israeli coastline. UN and European Union experts are expected in the region soon to put together a plan to deal with the contamination.

In Israel, meanwhile, officials from the Israel Nature and National Parks Protection Authority and the Jewish National Fund have yet to fully assess the extent of the damage caused by fires in the Galilee as the result of Hezbollah rocket strikes. Clearly, however, tens of thousands of dunams of forest and woodland have been destroyed by fire, causing severe ecological and landscape damage.

During the course of the fighting, JNF personnel dealt with some 600 incidents of fire; and the organization is preparing to allocate tens of millions of shekels to a campaign to rehabilitate and replant forests on the Naftali Mountains (west of Kiryat Shmona), in Beit Keshet (Central Galilee) and in Biriya (near Safed).

Officials at the INNPPA, on the other hand, are adopting a different approach, and plan to allow the natural woodlands and brush to rehabilitate themselves. "Natural woodlands require dozens of years to recover," says Didi Kaplan, the INNPPA's ecologist for the North. "The Katyushas' fires also damages areas of the Har Meron Reserve that were burned in 1978 and have yet to recover to this day."

According to Kaplan, "It is not just a matter of direct damage during the course of the fire. Tens of thousands of dunams of grassland were burned on the edges of the Golan Heights. I assume that the antelope that live in the area fled, but their source of food for the coming months has been damaged."

Kaplan believes that the grasslands on the Golan Heights will recover quickly, already after the coming winter. Regarding the woodlands, the INNPPA has no plans to intervene in their recovery but will have to take measures to prevent landslides in the winter.

During the course of the fighting, there were concerns in Israel regarding severe ecological damage as a result of rockets strikes on installations in the Haifa Bay area that contain hazardous materials, ammonia in particular. While no rockets struck such installations, Environment Ministry and Haifa region officials have noted the need to set up a number of protected sites for storing the ammonia, which, they say, is needed by many industries around the country.