Jimmy Carter, Trailblazing Champion of Palestinian Political Rights
Although Jimmy Carter was a committed supporter of the two-state solution, putting him squarely in the mainstream of the Washington foreign policy establishment, he was said to hold contentious views on the subject. Of all recent former U.S. presidents, he was the only one to be labeled "anti-Israel" as a matter of routine description. (Barack Obama is also sometimes called anti-Israel, but such obloquy is usually limited to conservatives and Republicans.)
So why did Carter attract the "anti-Israel" label? Not because of his White House record, but due to his post-presidential activities, and especially his 2006 book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."
However, these attacks on Carter preceded by some time his turn to blunter critiques of the Israeli occupation in more recent years. They started during his presidency and never really relented. In a way, they have always been about the same thing: Carter's sincere sympathy for the Palestinians and his belief that their political rights cannot be postponed indefinitely by Israel.
When Carter first ran for president in 1976, he adopted an unambiguous pro-Israel platform. He was, for example, against any U.S. contact with the PLO as long as the latter did not unconditionally recognize Israel. He told a gathering of Jewish leaders in Atlanta that "the Israelis did not cause the Palestinian problem," a message he would repeat in his Rosh Hashanah message to the Jewish community that year.
The lead to a New York Times article on Carter's campaign messaging around Israel stated, "Jimmy Carter has defined a series of positions on the Middle East that add up to a nearly complete list of what Israelis and American supporters of Israel like to hear."
Carter even sought to favorably contrast himself with President Gerald Ford, who supporters of Israel thought was putting too much pressure on the country, on the legal status of West Bank settlements.
Carter meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah in 2006.Credit: Ammar Awad/Reuters
But another crucial difference between Carter and Ford would prove to be the start of the former's trouble with pro-Israel opinion. Carter did not favor the "gradualist" approach to Middle East stability exemplified by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy." He believed that for Israel to be truly secure and a reliable ally for the United States, it needed a comprehensive peace with its neighbors. As part of this peace, Carter believed a political solution had to be found for the Palestinians.
This was a hugely significant shift at the time. Not since the U.S. vote in favor of the 1947 partition plan had Palestinian political (not just humanitarian or economic) aspirations been treated seriously by an American president.
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Though scarcely a transformative policy, Carter's recognition of the Palestinians as an important regional player would get him into trouble as president.
A few months after his inauguration, at a town hall meeting in Clinton, Massachusetts, the president declared that "there has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years." Despite the administration's continued rejection of the PLO, the remark was met with alarm by Israel and by pro-Israel Jewish leaders in the United States.
Carter visiting with a Palestinian boy who said he was beaten by the Israeli Border Police, East Jerusalem, 2010.Credit: Ammar Awad/Reuters
Similarly, a joint statement with the Soviet Union in October 1977 on plans to hold a Middle East peace summit in Geneva was greeted with stern opposition from both Israel and pro-Israel Jewish community leaders. They denounced what they saw as an abrupt change in U.S. policy toward the Palestinians.
On top of including the Soviets in the initiative, what most angered them was a reference to the "legitimate rights of the Palestinian people." In its statement, AIPACeffectively called any discussion of Palestinian political rights tantamount to putting Israel's existence at risk.
Even though it would have meant the easing of a political headache at little cost, Carter did not walk back his support for a Palestinian homeland. Archival documentsfrom the Carter administration show the phrase coming up repeatedly in meetings with foreign leaders. After mediating the Camp David Accords in 1978, Carter did not relent in his pursuit of a political arrangement for the Palestinians – however woefully insufficient the autonomy proposals discussed were in meeting basic Palestinian political desires.
He faced the wrath of pro-Israel Jewish community leaders, including ones who were otherwise progressive, for calling on Menachem Begin's government to freeze West Bank settlement construction.
For his conservative efforts on the Palestinian issue, Carter paid a steep price. While he helped remove Israel's largest military rival, Egypt, from the battlefield, Carter went into his 1980 reelection campaign with a reputation as being excessively tough on Israel and supportive of the Palestinians.
Though such polling four decades ago was not rock solid, Carter most likely did not win the majority of the Jewish vote that year, an outlier for Democratic presidents since Franklin Roosevelt. He also made a bitter enemy of New York City's pro-Israel mayor, Ed Koch, whose open sourness toward Carter probably contributed to the president's shocking defeat in the New York Democratic primary by Ted Kennedy.
Carter with Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin at Camp David in 1978. He helped remove Egypt from the battlefield.Credit: Moshe Milner/GPO
Still, one should not stretch credulity by calling Carter's policies pro-Palestinian. As historian Seth Anziska shows in his book "Preventing Palestine," Carter's success in brokering a peace between Egypt and Israel arguably put a Palestinian state even further out of reach by setting the course for future negotiations that disfavored the Palestinians.
Furthermore, as president, Carter was always reluctant to define the term "homeland" and outright rejected the idea of an independent state. But if Carter's words of sympathy ultimately did little for the Palestinians, they nevertheless represented a genuine desire to break from past policy. In Washington, as hard as it may be to imagine today, his words were radical.
Washington eventually caught up with Carter's stance on Palestinian political rights, but he was never able to shake off this image as a radical. His embracing the term "apartheid" in 2006 to describe the status quo in the occupied territories reinforced this reputation. Over 15 years later, the increasing prominence of this term in statements by reputable institutions around the world suggests that Carter was once again ahead of his time.
With Carter's death, we can learn from his experience not to overestimate the power of the current consensus in trapping our political imagination. Carter operated in an environment where talk of collective Palestinian rights – in other words, treating them as a proper nation – was politically verboten. Today references to Palestinian self-determination are commonplace even among those whose support for a Palestinian state is at a minimum questionable.
The promise of the Palestinians' freedom from Israeli occupation has not been fulfilled, but their national predicament cannot be suppressed in the halls of power as it once was. Carter himself only deserves a small amount of credit for this development, but the entire saga over his position on Israel and Palestine shows how far we have come in the last 40 years, even if the road ahead is distressingly long with not even the glimpse of an end in sight.
Abe Silberstein is a writer and commentator on Israel and U.S.-Israel relations. Twitter: @abesilbe