Jimmy Carter’s Legacy
Blog Post by Peter Eisenstadt, PPI Board Member
Partners for Progressive Israel mourns the passing of Jimmy Carter, z”l. At the same time, we acknowledge, with sadness and trepidation, that just over a week from now, there will be a transition of power in Washington from President Joe Biden to his lamentable successor. Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden have much in common. They were both good presidents and good people. They are the first one-term Democratic presidents since the Civil War. They both were presidents in challenging times, and their successes and failures will long be debated by historians, including their interactions with Israel, central to both presidencies.
When Jimmy Carter became president, he started from a position of general ignorance about the Middle East, and made some initial blunders, notably the firing of UN Ambassador Andrew Young for meeting with the UN representative of the PLO; but the Camp David accords are perhaps the signal achievement of his presidency. Later, in his post-presidency, Carter was a stalwart defender of the Palestinian right to self-determination, and was courageous in challenging the American foreign policy consensus on Israel. He was widely anathematized in 2006 for suggesting that Israel, without a radical course correction, was on the road to “apartheid” in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Perhaps if his warning had been heeded by American policy and opinion makers, we would as a nation have been able to assert more effective pressure against it. Carter and Biden were both serious and devout Christians. Israel’s most strident supporters in the US are not Jews, most of whom remain firmly liberal and Netanyahu-skeptical, but evangelical Christians, many nourished on anti-Islamic prejudices and curdled fantasies out of the Book of Revelation. Carter imbibed southern evangelical Protestantism with his mother’s milk, but he forged a deeper understanding of his faith tradition, in part through his identification with the Jesus of the Beatitudes, and aided by his exposure to the Black Christianity of Andrew Young, Martin Luther King, Howard Thurman, and many others. Let Jimmy Carter’s memory be a blessing for Christians, Jews, and Muslims and all who wish to see the Jewish people and the Palestinian people living as equals in the land they must forever share.
Peter Eisenstadt is an independent historian and the author of several books including Rochdale Village, Encyclopedia of African American Culture and History, and Black Conservatism.
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