Jimmy Carter at 100: his Jewish legacy

Former President Jimmy Carter, who celebrated his 100^th birthday on October 1, has something to live for.

Back in July, Carter’s son Chip asked his father if he was trying to make it to his 100th birthday. “I’m trying to make it to vote for Kamala Harris,” President Carter replied. Early voting in Georgia begins on October 15 so Carter, who has spent 18 months in hospice care, is on the cusp of attaining his goal.

But it is not his vote for Vice President Harris that will be the highlight of Carter’s public life. His greatest accomplishment was brokering, along with Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the 1979 Camp David Accords, establishing peace between Israel and Egypt.

The 45-year tenure of what, at the time, would have seemed a fragile peace, is itself remarkable given the continuously roiling politics of the region. In that time, governments have been toppled in Iran and Iraq, civil wars have wracked Syria and Yemen, and the Arab Spring drove Egyptian President Hosni Mubarek, Sadat’s successor, from power.

Sadat and Begin deserve great credit for Camp David, especially Sadat who took the politically risky move of visiting Israel in 1978, but it was Carter of whom Middle East analyst Aaron David Miller, in his 2009 book Too Much Promised Land, said "no matter whom I spoke to — Americans, Egyptians, or Israelis — most everyone said the same thing: no Carter, no peace treaty."

While peace was attained through Egypt providing Israel with security guarantees in return for territory, it was only achieved by putting off resolution of the thorniest issue of all: self-determination of the Palestinian people, calling only for the establishment of a five-year transition period toward full autonomy for the Palestinians, a five-year transition that never came about.

This was a tactic that President Donald Trump took one step further in 2020 by ignoring the Palestinians entirely while forging the Abraham Accords.

But Carter, unlike Trump, was surely familiar with Langston Hughes’ poem Harlem which famously asks “what happens to a dream deferred?... does it dry up like a raisin in the sun… or does it explode?”

Troubled by the decades-long deferral of the Palestinians’ dream of self-determination, Carter returned to the Middle East conflict in 2006 with the publication of his controversial book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The bulk of the criticism was in reaction to the word ‘apartheid’ in the title. For example, Abraham H. Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, charged that “the title is to de-legitimize Israel, because if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn’t really deserve to be a democratic state. He’s provoking, he’s outrageous, and he’s bigoted.”

The New York Times described a range of additional concerns which included “Carter’s assertions that pro-Israel lobbyists have stifled debate in the United States over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; that Israelis are guilty of human rights abuses in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories; and that the editorial pages of American newspapers rarely present anything but a pro-Israel viewpoint”, all topics that remain salient today.

Carter, although meeting with a group of 31 rabbis to discuss these concerns, ultimately brushed aside the criticism, returning to the topic in his 2009 book We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land. While defending his previous use of the term apartheid, he explained that “everyone who engages in Middle East peacemaking is bound to make mistakes and suffer frustrations. Everyone must overcome the presence of hatred and fanaticism, and the memories of horrible tragedies. Everyone must face painful choices and failures in negotiations. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the time is ripe for peace in the region.”

One can only imagine that, after a lifetime of peace activism as president, as private citizen, and through the Carter Center, he would today, from his hospice bed, again declare the time ripe for peace, despite a conflict seemingly more deeply entrenched than ever.

There are other, albeit less prominent, factors that establish Carter as the most significant president for the Jewish people (sorry, Donald).

In 1978, Carter established the President's Commission on the Holocaust, chaired by Elie Wiesel. Its mandate was to investigate the creation and maintenance of a memorial to victims of the Holocaust and an appropriate annual commemoration to them.

In 1980, a unanimous vote in Congress established the Holocaust Memorial Museum on its present site near the Washington Monument.

The Carter Administration authorised the erection of a Chabad sponsored nine-metre tall menorah in Lafayette Park near the White House. During the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, Carter participated in the US’ first National Menorah Lighting, a tradition that has continued annually.

His administration also created a special visa category permitting tens of thousands of Iranian Jews fleeing the Iranian Revolution to emigrate to America.

In the 2024 Presidential Greatness Survey, aggregating the view of 154 Presidential historians, Jimmy Carter ranks 22^nd among the 45 presidents, smack dab in the middle. Nonetheless, it would be hard to argue that any of the other 44 were more consequential for the Jewish people.

RELATED STORIES

Democratic poll shows 71% of Jewish voters across 7 swing states favor Kamala Harris (JTA)A poll of Jewish voters in seven swing states is consistent with a recent national poll of Jewish voters.

I’m not interested in someone passive about Gaza’: how views on the war have changed dating in America (Guardian)
As Americans grapple with tensions within and beyond their communities, intimate relationships are strained: ‘Differences feel much bigger now’