Jimmy Carter’s Obsession with Israel Hugh Fitzgerald
Much of the world is describing Jimmy Carter as a saintly soul who went around the world building housing for the poor, monitoring elections to make sure they were free and fair, and still managing — such a humble man! — to teach Sunday School at the small church in his hometown of Plains, Georgia. But those familiar with his obsessive dislike of Israel that descended into outright antisemitism have a different view of the Man From Plains. The historian Michael Oren reminds us of this side of James Earl Carter, Jr. here: “Jimmy Carter: A Jewish tragedy – opinion,” by Michael Oren, Jerusalem Post, December
Among many other time-tested attributes, the Jewish people have a long memory. Aid us in the manner of the ancient Persian King Cyrus, and we will remember you forever fondly. Cross us as Seleucid King Antiochus IV did, and we will curse you every Hanukkah.
Our talent for remembering is particularly salient today after the death, at age of 100, of former president Jimmy Carter.
While the rest of the world is now hailing him as a statesman who, after his failed one-term presidency, rose to become an unstinting peacemaker, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and a paragon of now non-existent virtues, many Jews will have a far more ambivalent reaction.
Not just Jews, but all those who care about Israel, will be reluctant to join in the orgy of posthumous praise for Jimmy Carter.
The man whose legacy could have been cherished by future Jewish generations, with streets in Jerusalem named for him and communities created in his honor, will be at best forgotten, if not reviled. That is the tragedy of Jimmy Carter, a leader who could have gone down in Jewish history as a second Truman, will be recalled, if at all, as another Bernie Sanders.
The tragedy is compounded by the fact that the Jewish state owes Carter an immense historical debt. In an anomalous way, his insistence on including the Soviets in the Middle East peace process immediately after Egypt succeeded in evicting them convinced president Anwar Sadat of the need to act swiftly and independently of the United States.
The result came in November 1977, with Sadat’s groundbreaking visit to Israel. Carter, to his credit, leaped into the diplomatic breach, and devoted 13 presidential days to forging the Camp David Peace Accords between Egypt and Israel. Though never close to yielding a warm peace, that treaty has since withstood tectonic pressures and relieved Israel of the threat of large-scale Arab armies.
What keeps the peace between Israel and Egypt is not the peace treaty that Carter helped to hammer out at Camp David in 1979, but Egypt’s recognition that were it to again go to war against Israel, it would undoubtedly be crushed, lose — for the second time — the entire Sinai, and this time, have no hope of ever getting it back.
But, sadly, that achievement proved to be a one-off. The self-proclaimed champion of human rights, Carter was comfortable with Middle Eastern dictators like Sadat, Hafez al-Assad, and the shah of Iran, but endlessly critical of Israel’s democratically elected leaders, beginning with Menachem Begin.
No sooner were the Camp David Accords signed in 1979 than Carter embarked on a 40-year smear campaign against Israel.
In my meeting with him several years after, Carter insisted that Israel was violating UN Resolution 242 by not withdrawing to the pre-Six Day War boundaries and failing to create a Palestinian state.
My assurances that the resolution specifically voided the return to the indefensible 1967 borders and made no mention of the Palestinians, much less of a state, were righteously rejected.
Carter refused to recognize that UN Resolution 242 deliberately did not call for Israel to withdraw from “all of the territories” it had won in the Six-Day War, but only “from territories.” Carter misread, and misled others about, UN Resolution 242.
Carter has had a lot to say over the years about UN Resolution 242, all of it wrong, and most of it appalling. He tried to make it mean what the Arabs wanted it to mean, not what its author, Lord Caradon, intended it to mean.
In his 2016 article “America Must Recognize Palestine,” Jimmy Carter treats a sentence from the non-binding preamble to Resolution 242 as if it were a binding part of the Resolution itself. He thinks that the phrase about the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” applies to Israel, when examination of the Mandate for Palestine reveals that it is Jordan, not Israel, that is claiming territory in the “West Bank” based solely on its acquisition by war (in 1949). Carter then asserts that the other key words of Resolution 242 are these: “the withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” He wants you to think that this means that Israel is required to withdraw from “all the territories” that it won in the 1967 war. And indeed, the Arab diplomats at the U.N. sought, repeatedly, to have the words “the” or “all the” inserted before “territories.” But they failed.
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