Jimmy Carter’s Middle East achievement

When you enter the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum in Atlanta, you walk down a long hallway telling the story of how the boy from Plains, Ga., became a nuclear submarine engineer, then governor of Georgia, and eventually president of the United States. Next comes a circular room dedicated to his presidency and then a long hallway back to the entrance featuring memorabilia from his post-presidential activities, from fighting disease in Africa to building Habitat for Humanity homes in America.

The main feature of the single space dedicated to Carter’s time in the White House is a retrospective on the 1978 Camp David Accords, bringing peace between Israel and Egypt. In a presidency otherwise lacking in legacy, the treaty is his primary foreign affairs achievement. Indeed, author Lawrence Wright ranks it as “one of the greatest diplomatic triumphs of the twentieth century.”

When Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat convened at Camp David, their countries had fought four if not five wars against one another in the previous 30 years. Israel was born in battle in 1948 when David Ben-Gurion first declared the modern state of Israel as the British Mandate ended. Through several subsequent wars with its Arab neighbors—Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia—the flinty Jewish nation had survived. As all the other Arabs refused to even recognize the existence of Israel, Sadat took the first step toward peace in a massively publicized trip to Jerusalem in 1977. Carter saw the opportunity and seized it.

Through a fortnight of intense negotiation, jockeying, cajoling, and horse-trading, Carter talked Begin and Sadat into the Camp David Accords, the first formal peace between Israel and an Arab state. Once the treaty was signed, the two nations traded ambassadors, opened commercial flights, and began trading as they both demilitarized the Sinai region. It was an accomplishment that would stand unrivaled for more than a decade when Israel concluded the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1993 and then a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. Another decade-plus would pass again before the 2020 Abraham Accords brought recognition from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco. The work is not yet done. To this day, more than 25 Muslim-majority states still do not formally recognize Israel.

As our nation mourns Carter’s passing, friends of Israel owe him a great debt of gratitude for that first breakthrough toward peace in the Middle East. As Wright recounts in his blow-by-blow history of the Camp David summit, Thirteen Days in September, Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter were both personally committed to the cause of Israel since a trip the couple took to the Holy Land in 1973. That passion matched U.S. policy to prefer its longtime ally Israel, while at the same time knowing that the best thing for Israel was a fair, lasting peace with its neighbors, starting with Egypt. It was also best for the United States, because by making them both well-armed allies at peace with one another, America maintained the best counterbalance to the Soviet Union’s malign influence in the region.

Sadly, in the years that followed, Carter drifted from his original enthusiasm for Israel. In particular, his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, was widely criticized as unfair to Israel. The title’s invocation of “apartheid” was seen as negatively comparing Israel’s policies to the racist segregation of South Africa.

Israel and Egypt also had their ups and downs in the years after Camp David. Egypt has generally been ruled by army generals who maintain the accord because the United States provides the North African nation with substantial military aid contingent on that commitment.

That relationship hit a brief bump when the Arab Spring came to Egypt, unseating longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak and empowering the Muslim Brotherhood. As former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren observes in his memoir Ally, the worrying lesson of this period is that the best thing for the survival of democracy in Israel is the lack of democracy in its Arab neighbors like Egypt.

No wonder, then, that Israel breathed a quiet sigh of relief as the Egyptian army took power again in 2013, led by current President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Last year, Sisi hosted a trilateral regional summit with the prime minister of Israel and the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (“MbZ” to regional insiders).

When he arrived at Camp David in 1978, Egypt’s Sadat had a typed list of several pages reciting all the typical Arab demands of Israel for a comprehensive peace. Reviewing it, the lawyerly Begin took umbrage at virtually every point. Through patient, persistent, personal diplomacy, Carter worked them both to the point where they could agree to a treaty that did not resolve all the issues in the Israel-Palestine debate—an answer that still eludes the world more than 46 years later—but that brought a workable, sustainable calm between Israel and its largest, most powerful neighbor. That was no small achievement for peace.