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Engaging with Jimmy Carter’s Legacy

Peace with Egypt was a unique achievement. But Carter was also unique in the type of criticism he hurled at Israel.
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January 1, 2025
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter visits the Arab East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan on October 21, 2010 in East Jerusalem. (Photo by Ammar Awad – Pool/Getty Images)

For many years, Israeli leaders avoided Jimmy Carter. They were not the first  — nor the only — ones to sidestep a meeting with the former president. Various members of the Clinton administration, including both the president and his wife, Hillary, preferred to avoid him. Most senior officials in the George H.W. Bush administration — up to and including the president — avoided him; almost all members of the George W. Bush White House did the same. Carter had a peculiar quality: he seemed to find it easier to bond with dictators. If the people one engages with are a reflection of their character, Carter’s list of preferred interlocutors speaks volumes. It includes the likes of Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and Kim Il-Sung.

Carter died at 100, of which only four years were spent at the top echelon of U.S. policy making. But an Israeli must attempt to remember him with certain appreciation, because of his role as peace-maker. He deserves at least some of the credit for he 1978 Israel-Egypt peace accords. And it is still the most important contribution of any American president to Israel’s national security. 

With such an achievement, you’d expect Carter to easily win a popularity contest in Israel. He never did. In a 2015 poll, Carter was ranked by Israelis lowest on relations with Israel of all previous presidents. Barak Obama, the sitting president at that time, ranked even lower, but, as I explained at the time, that’s “due to Israelis’ short memories, many of which don’t remember his term, or just vaguely remember it.” Among older Israelis, who might still remember him with certain clarity, Carter’s numbers tanked.  

Peace with Egypt was a unique achievement. But Carter was also unique in the type of criticism he hurled at Israel. He undoubtedly contributed to humanitarian efforts, as Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to George H.W. Bush, once noted. But Scowcroft would also mention that Carter’s political judgment was “simply abysmal.” In the early 1990s, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the former president opposed military action to expel Saddam’s forces. He even proposed a “creative” solution to the crisis: “This is the perfect time for Israel to launch an honest peace initiative,” he thought, suggesting a trade — Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories in exchange for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait. 

Carter’s creativity produced many such ideas, few of them useful, some of them harmful and many of them downright bizarre. And yes, quite often they involved Israel. In 1977, at a formal dinner at the White House in honor of Saudi Prince Fahd, Carter expressed his view of the Israeli-Arab conflict in troubling terms: “Peace in the region,” he said, referring to Israel and its neighbors, “largely means a chance for world peace.” This was perhaps the most extreme articulation of the all-encompassing “linkage” theory. Resolving the festering scar of the Israeli-Arab conflict, Carter implied, was not merely essential to calming a violent Middle East. It also held the key to solving the world’s problems. Not for the last time, this early statement was dangerously close to antisemitic tropes that tie global crises and challenges to the acts of the world’s few Jews. 

For decades, from Reagan to Obama, U.S. administrations have had to endure Carter’s relentless activism and, perhaps more galling for succeeding politicians, his remarkable talent for self-promotion. When the Clinton administration reached an agreement with North Korea — a deal Carter had played a role in brokering — its officials were stunned to see the former president claim credit in a nationally broadcast interview. He used the same skill to sell his books, including one that labeled Israel “an apartheid state.”

His claim to fame was an aggressive push for engagement with all vile enemies. Whether it’s Hamas, Assad’s Syria, or the Maoist guerrillas of Nepal – all three used by him as positive examples of his approach – the formula was always the same: Recruit Carter, let him engage, problem solved. But as I wrote in one such occasion, There’s no moral virtue in talking to one’s enemies. Engagement is a tool, but so are disengagement and even isolation. Both are effective, if used wisely; both can be damaging if used in haste. Talking to one’s enemies is a tool. Hamas and Syria – assisted by Carter – used it as they were trying to counter the isolation being applied to them. 

The American people corrected the mistake of electing Carter in 1976. But Carter was never a quitter. And from an Israeli perspective, his presence gradually grew from the level of nuisance to the level of headache. Since the country never bought into his religion of engagement, when Carter insisted on visiting Israel, he found little to engage with. In 2008, the former President was relegated to a courtesy meeting with Israel’s president, a person who holds little sway over Israeli policies. In 2015, not even Israel’s president would see him.

Something I wrote in Hebrew

I recently analyzed the last 50 political polls and came up with the following conclusions:

So what did we learn? That the glue of the coalition is strong. That is, unless its leaders have polls that show that almost all the polls we — the public — see are inaccurate. As far as I know, they don’t have such polls … It is true that there is some show of confidence (on the right) and anxiety (on the center-left) that “Bibi will win again” in the next election. And maybe he really will win. But right now, if there’s an election, this would be an unexpected result. Right now, the coalition probably doesn’t have enough votes to win. What it does have in an abundance is time. It can pass the next two years hoping that the picture will change. That’s the coalition’s political strategy.

A week’s numbers

Israel is still at war, with Israelis killed and maimed on a daily basis, and yet, this is what Israeli Jews still think…

A reader’s response

Andy C. asks: Did many Israelis see The Bibi Files? Answer: Define “many.” Truth is, there’s no data about this but I assume the answer is no. Not many Israelis did.


Shmuel Rosner is senior political editor. For more analysis of Israeli and international politics, visit Rosner’s Domain at jewishjournal.com/rosnersdomain.

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