Michael Oren
Clarity with Michael Oren, Dec. 30, 2024
“Carter wasn’t satisfied with merely libeling Israel. His final decades were devoted to whitewashing Hamas and presenting it as an organization opposed to terror and dedicated to peace.”
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 the 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 nonexistent virtues, many Jews will have a far more ambivalent reaction. 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, leapt 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.
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 forty-year smear campaign against Israel. In my meeting with him several years after the ceremony, 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. ….SOURCE