Thank you, Jimmy Carter

Five years ago, I attended one of President Jimmy Carter’s last public speeches: an annual lecture to the freshman class of Emory University. Carter was honoring an ancient tradition of my alma mater, and I relished the opportunity to hear from a former president.

I came with my own preconceptions of Jimmy Carter: the failed one-term president and faux humanitarian who had accused Israel of apartheid. I expected to leave with feelings of bitterness and resentment, but I was instead struck by the sincerity and depth of the elder statesman. The man that I had been taught to treat as an enemy of the Jewish people was—in reality—a well-meaning paternalist who had brokered Israel’s first peace agreement with an Arab state.

In 1979, Israel gave up the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for peace with Egypt, the linchpin of the Arab world. Carter was instrumental in the diplomatic breakthrough—yet his relationship with the Jewish community was complicated thereafter. In fact, it became more resistant to summation by the decade.

President Carter was not antisemitic, but he was consumed by a naivety shared by many peacemakers. He rued his administration’s failure to resolve a comprehensive Middle East peace and blamed one man—Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin—for what he described as an historic missed opportunity. In Carter’s eyes, Begin’s refusal to negotiate Palestinian statehood denied him a more complete peace deal in 1979 and perpetuated the suffering of the Palestinian people ex-post facto. Had Begin not refused to negotiate sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza, Carter believed he could have both won a second term and brokered a peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinians. Historians are less certain.

To be sure, Begin viewed the West Bank as an integral part of the Jewish patrimony and had no tangible item to offer to the Palestinians; this meant that Carter could not initiate a conclusive Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 1979. But Begin’s commitment to Eretz Yisrael was far from the only obstacle to peace. At the time of the Camp David negotiations, no other Arab actor—including Jordan—was willing to cross the same rubicon that Sadat had by recognizing Israel in deed as well as rhetoric. Jordan did eventually sign a peace agreement with Israel, but leaders in the West Bank and Gaza never relinquished their aspiration for a maximalist Palestinian state, despite what President Carter may have written.

The Palestinian leadership has long presented itself as more diplomatic than it truly is, and Carter was susceptible to their taqiyya. He was an idealist who allowed his yearning for peace to distort his own perception of reality. He saw what he wanted to see—namely, a Palestinian national movement that had reconciled itself with Israel’s existence—and turned a blind eye to the duplicity of leaders such as Yasser Arafat and Abu Mazen. His book, Peace, not Apartheid, drew widespread opprobrium after it likened Israel’s security arrangements in the West Bank to South African apartheid (unjustifiably, I believe) and lambasted the settlement policy in the disputed territories.

Ever the quixotic humanitarian, Carter made the blunder of scapegoating Israel, and only Israel, for the plight of the Palestinian people. His unbalanced analysis failed to account for the Palestinian embrace of terrorism, as well as the five offers of statehood that Palestinian leaders have roundly rejected over the past eighty years. It contained outrageous errors of both commission and omission. He leveraged his prestige as a former president to lend credence to libels and falsehoods against the Jewish state, and for that he deserved a degree of the condemnation he received during his lifetime.

But still, there is something profound that many in our community have missed about the deceased Nobel Laureate. President Carter’s relationship with the Jewish people was complex, and that means we must resist the urge to cast baseless aspersions and accusations of bigotry. It means embracing the failures and accomplishments that will define his legacy. It means accepting that Carter’s glaring flaw was his credulity–not some broadly-defined antisemitism—and that his greatest diplomatic triumph was also Israel’s.

His intervention at Camp David was nothing short of astonishing, and the geopolitical fruits accrued by Israel through the agreement with Egypt far outweigh the damage of any single monograph. Over forty years on from Camp David, the Israel-Egypt peace treaty has survived a tumultuous period comprising Israel’s controversial invasion of Lebanon and the Arab Spring. Egypt and Israel have not engaged in war and no other Arab state has attacked Israel. The prime ministers that followed Begin faced their gravest security threats from non-state actors such as the PLO, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The treaty assured that young Israeli soldiers and ordinary citizens would no longer be killed on Egyptian battlefields; Begin achieved his raison d’être of keeping Egypt—the most powerful of Israel’s foes—out of any future military engagement in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and he did so only because President Carter devoted every fiber of his being to reaching a deal.

Success at Camp David was far from guaranteed, and it was made possible by the political will and courage of its chief protagonists. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin made compromises with territory that were difficult to defend before the most intransigent segments of their populations – so much so that Sadat was assassinated by an Islamist extremist only two years after signing the peace treaty with Israel.

At the same time, President Carter’s determination and willingness to bring pressure to bear on both leaders, especially Begin, was unprecedented for an American president and proved decisive in finding compromises when others might have relented. At Camp David, Begin and Sadat met only occasionally on walks around the series of small cottages that characterized the complex. Indeed, the details of the two agreements—and the most painful concessions made by both sides—were largely extracted in private meetings between American mediators and the respective Israeli and Egyptian negotiators. For two consecutive weeks, Carter eschewed domestic policy concerns and focused on resolving one international conflict. In so doing, he secured an agreement that will forever adorn his legacy, and a long-lasting strategic boon for the Jewish state.

Politics is a zero-sum profession, its outcomes etched in unmistakable clarity. Either you win or you lose. In the minds of many, Carter lost because he was a one-term president who spent his post-presidency demonizing Israel and venerating its enemies. He did not drape himself in glory on the Palestinian question. His castigation of life-saving measures such as the security barrier and sanitization of the PLO will leave a sour taste in the mouths of Israel’s supporters, as it should.

Yet as we bid farewell to President Carter, we must adopt a more discerning approach than we have in the past. Carter was not without fault (no one is), but he did make Israel safer, and he was always honest in his critique of Israel’s policies. For all its glaring errors, Peace, not Apartheid was not motivated by a nefarious intent to delegitimize Israel or justify terrorism against its citizens. In many ways, President Carter was warning his fellow Zionists about the inevitable result of Israel’s settlement policy outside of its de-jure borders: one state for two peoples, the antithesis of a Jewish democracy. Though his specific choice of wording was often misguided and provocative, it always came from a place of deeper concern. President Carter truly cared about securing the future of the Jewish people, and the peace treaty he brokered with Egypt still stands as Israel’s greatest diplomatic achievement. Despite being neither Jewish nor Palestinian, he devoted his life to the cause of peace, and we owe him a depth of gratitude.

Thank you, Jimmy Carter.