In the first days after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat announced his willingness to travel to Jerusalem to advance peace in 1977, which ultimately led to the historic Camp David peace treaty, the Carter administration maintained a public stance of ambivalence. This reflected a division among the president’s top advisors, Mark Siegal remembers.
Siegal, the Jewish liaison in the first year of the Carter administration, describes “contentious” White House meetings where he, in favor of the Sadat-Begin initiative, disagreed, in front of the president, with Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor.
Siegal said that he argued that Sadat’s outreach to Egypt’s longtime enemy represented a once-in-a-lifetime breakthrough; Brzeninski saw bilateral negotiations as inimical to a comprehensive peace that involved other Arab governments and the Palestinians.
Carter seemed at first to favor Brzezinski’s position, but, persuaded by Vice President Walter Mondale’s vocal advocacy of a possible Israeli-Egyptian peace, gave his enthusiastic support to the Egyptian-Israeli effort. This grew into Carter’s crucial role at the Camp David negotiations the next year, Siegal says.
The Camp David accords won Sadat and Begin the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 and, in part, the same honor for Carter in 2002, “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts.”
The 38th commander-in-chief of the United States, peanut-farmer-turned-president, left a mixed legacy — as a persuasive negotiator at Camp David, and as a former president who often profoundly disappointed and even angered the pro-Israel community.
In his post-presidency years Carter, as an elder statesman and frequent commentator on the Middle East, took positions that many viewed as anti-Israel, bordering on anti-Semitic. Particularly infuriating were his 2007 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Simon & Schuster), and his subsequent comments that put much of the blame for the continuing Israeli-Palestinian impasse on Israel.
In his 2007 book, Carter wrote of “the abominable oppression and persecution in the occupied Palestinian territories, with a rigid system of required passes and strict segregation between Palestine’s citizens and Jewish settlers in the West Bank.”
Following the publication of the book, 14 members of the Carter Center community board resigned in protest.
During a visit to Israel, Carter said he did not request a meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu because the Israeli leader “does not now and has never sincerely believed in a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine.
“It would be a waste of time to ask” for a meeting with Netanyahu, the Washington Post quoted Carter as saying.
While many disagreed with putting the apartheid label on Israel, they said that this did not reduce the luster of his achievements in orchestrating the Camp David agreements.
Supporters of the Palestinian cause, on the other hand, often praised Carter’s post-presidency remarks. He “has done what few American politicians have dared to do: speak frankly about the Israel-Palestine conflict,” said the electronicintifada.net website after Carter’s “Apartheid” book appeared.
Carter was an early advocate of a “two-state solution,” Siegal told the Jewish Week. “He [was] not anti-Israel. He [was] a strong believer in two states.’”
Anti-Semitic?
“He [was] not a bigot. There [was] not a bigoted bone in the man’s body,” said Siegal, who went on to a career as a lobbyist after he left the White House.
The “apartheid” term “creates some clouds” about Carter’s legacy, “but does not cut across his overall accomplishments,” Mondale said. “’Apartheid’ was very unfortunate. I said that with Mr. Carter sitting there.”
Mondale, in a telephone interview from Minneapolis before he died in 2021, and where he was still working as a lawyer, said that Carter’s “remarkable leadership” at Camp David “changed the dynamics in the Middle East.
“I do not buy the argument that Carter [was] anti-Semitic. He was a long-time advocate for peace between Israel and Palestine.”
“The greatest commitment in my life has been trying to bring peace to Israel,” Carter told the Atlanta Press Club close to a decade ago, adding that he called Israel “a wonderful democracy . . . where everyone has guaranteed equal rights.”
In a conversation at Brandies University with then-Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, Carter defended his use of the term “apartheid.”
During post-publication interviews, Carter called Israeli policy in the West Bank worse than the apartheid of South Africa’s white-dominated government from 1948 until 1994.
“Apartheid is a word that is an accurate description of what has been going on in the West Bank, and it’s based on the desire or avarice of a minority of Israelis for Palestinian land. It’s not based on racism. Those caveats are clearly made in the book,” he said in another interview.
In an essay published in response to Carter’s “Apartheid” book, foreign policy analyst Mitchell Bard criticized the former president for “put[ting] the worst possible interpretation on any Jewish deed or word, while validating anything said or done by Palestinians.
“He claims that Israel puts ‘confiscation of Palestinian land ahead of peace’ despite the fact that Israel has withdrawn from 94% of the territory it captured in 1967.
“Carter returns again and again to the theme that Israel has stolen ‘Palestinian land,’ but he presents no evidence that the land belongs to the Palestinians and ignores all Israeli claims,” Bard wrote.
“Carter’s narrative (it can’t be called an analysis, because there is no critical consideration of the issues) is transparently self-serving, holding himself out to be the one person who sees the problem and solution clearly.
“Carter also selectively quotes from polls to make the Palestinians look moderate.”
“Mr. Carter’s greatest achievements lay in foreign policy, in the humbling aftermath of Vietnam,” Stuart Eizenstat, who served in the Carter and Bill Clinton administrations in several positions, wrote in an New York Times op-ed essay in 2015.
“In an extraordinary act of diplomatic negotiation . . . Mr. Carter produced the first Middle East peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. It remains a touchstone of United States security policy in the region.”
During his 1976 presidential campaign, while still a relatively little known former one-term governor of Georgia with minimal foreign policy credentials, Carter urged the creation of a “Palestinian homeland” and called on Israel to withdraw from the West Bank. He also supported legislation that would prohibit US corporations from complying with the Arab trade boycott of Israel.
Carter received 64% of the Jewish vote in his 1976 race against Gerald Ford, and 45% in his unsuccessful 1980 re-election bid against Ronald Reagan, both low figures for Democratic presidential candidates.
He touted as successes his establishment of the Dept. of Education and the Dept. of Energy, increased college tuition grants for needy students, an end to federal price regulation of several industries, phasing out of federal price controls for natural gas and crude oil, establishment of full diplomatic relations with China, and limiting arms sales to military dictatorships.
Two former members of the diplomatic corps said that the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt that Mr. Carter helped broker remained his outstanding accomplishment, which defined his presidency, despite the subsequent controversy over his attitude toward Israel and failure to secure the release of American hostages from Iran.
“The Egyptian-Israel peace treaty will remain as President Carter’s signature foreign policy achievement,” said Daniel Kurtzer, who was US ambassador to Egypt during the Bill Clinton administration and as ambassador to Israel under George W. Bush. “It has withstood the test of time.
“Carter’s personal reputation,” based on his post-presidency actions, “will likely be different, given the strong criticisms he directed at Israel,” Kurtzer said. “As president, Carter balanced Israeli and Egyptian requirements well enough that both sides saw him as a fair and necessary third-party negotiator.
“Since leaving office, Carter [was] much more understanding of Palestinian positions and requirements than of Israel’s. [His] views on the Arab-Israel conflict took him outside the mainstream of Democratic Party politics.”
Aaron David Miller, who worked for the State Department for 24 years, advising six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli matters, called Carter’s role in the Camp David accords “a seminal event . . . an unarguable success. None of his successors have come close to that achievement.”
The Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty “would not have happened without Carter’s role,” said Miller, now senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in Washington, DC. “You needed someone who was determined and willing.”
Carter’s stance on Israel apparently changed after he left the White House, Miller said. “He lost that sense of a mediator’s balance that served him so well.
“I would argue that he lost sight of the fact that Israel is a threatened nation.”Miller said.
“He understood the ‘power of the strong,’” the restraints that a powerful nation must exert in its policies, and which Carter felt Israel had not.
“Carter [didn’t] fully realize the power of the weak,” the position of an underdog that a less-powerful group can use to justify any behavior, including, in the case of the Palestinians, terrorism. “It allows” the weaker side “to support just about everything,” said Miller.
How will posterity judge Mr. Carter?
“That depends on the audience, the constituency,” Miller said.
For “a vast numbers of Israelis” and supporters of Israel, stung by the former president’s incessant criticism of Israel, “he will be viewed quite negatively,” Miller said.
He added, “there are a lot of people who view Jimmy Carter as [having] an incredibly successful post-presidency.”
In 2010, during the uproar over his “Apartheid” book, Carter sent a letter of apology, for his words or deeds that may have upset the Jewish community, to JTA.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, he wrote that he was offering an Al Chet, the prayer of forgiveness recited on the Day of Atonement.
“We must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel,” he wrote in the letter. “As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Chet for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so.”
