Jimmy Carter

Summary

President of the United States, the first president to have spoken seriously, albeit rather abstractly, of the Palestinian people, in Said’s account — and the president who, with Sadat and Begin, signed the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in Washington on March 26, 1979, while never, so far as is known, having met a Palestinian.

Details

• Carter’s sudden pronouncements about the Palestinians and a comprehensive peace precipitated important changes in an Arab world uniformly unable to assess them; it seemed almost certain Carter found himself closer to the Arab nationalist, Syrian Baathist, argument, and everything up to mid-November 1977 pointed toward a Geneva peace conference with Palestinian presence and Soviet cooperation (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.222 / printed p.201).

• Carter magnanimously affirmed that Palestinians had the right to participate in the determination of their own future, and also argued that the PLO was to us an organization like the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan and the Communist Party, and that we wish it would go away; in the years since he took office he expressed his views on the Palestinians on numerous occasions, yet so far as is known never so much as met a Palestinian (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.215 / printed p.194).

• Even fiercely independent commentators like I. F. Stone found it hard to avoid speaking of President Carter except as an epic hero after Camp David, and liberal columnists argued Camp David was all we had (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.212 / printed p.191).

• Carter, like many of his predecessors, is trying to convince everyone that narrowness, militarism, factionalism and interventionism can at some point be translated into a just and comprehensive peace; Said’s point is that such a transmutation cannot occur so long as those limiting terms are held to, because the transformation is predicated upon the Palestinians giving up their national existence (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.218 / printed p.197).

• A CBS-New York Times poll in late March 1979 revealed most people unimpressed with the treaty: it cost too much, there was widespread disapproval at the arms promised Egypt and Israel (estimates varied from $5billionto$15 billion), and over 70 percent disapproved of the American promise to supply Israel with oil for the next fifteen years (The Question of Palestine, PDF p.219 / printed p.198).

• Makdisi quotes Carter’s Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid on Camp David in 2000: “There was no possibility that any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive,” yet official statements from Washington and Jerusalem placed the onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat (Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, PDF p.135).

Related pages

The Question of Palestine, Camp David Accords, Anwar al-Sadat, Palestine Liberation Organization