A Guest Post by Dr Harold Goldmeier
Dr.
Harold Goldmeier speaks for free to public forums about political and social
policy matters. He teaches international university students in Israel courses
in Business, Middle East Politics, Modern Zionism. Harold.goldmeier@gmail.com
JIMMY CARTER: POPULAR
BUT NOT AMONG JEWS
My sister lives in Atlanta and tells me former President
Carter is held in high regard but not among Jews. To us, Carter is a chimera. Carter is rated by YouGov as the 10th most popular public figure and 23rd
most famous. 53% of the nation holds a positive opinion of him, while 43% are
negative to neutral. Jewish emotions range from simmering indignation to
curdling rage. Among my Gen Z international gap year college students, Carter
is a cloudy antiquarian. Israel apartheid week on campuses and his repeated
slurs against Israel the apartheid nation gins up Carter’s fame.
Some former presidents of the U. S. fade into the night rarely
making public appearances after leaving office. President James Earl Carter,
Jr., who served as 39th president from 1977 to 1981, is one the most
inexhaustible and prolific past presidents. He is a leading global advocate for
issues he believes were left undone in his one term presidency.
People have strong opinions about his presidential
effectiveness and persona. Author Stuart E. Eizenstat hasn’t changed my
opinions of the president or the man but Eizenstat’s book is fraught with background.
He gins-up my interests to know the “rest of the stories” behind world events
during President Carter’s White House days.
President Carter: The
White House Years, (St. Martin’s Press 2018), is a plodding read of more
than 900 pages each filled with lots of print. It took me six weeks to finish
the book despite skimming-over parts. Perhaps it is my unshakeable impression
of President Carter that turns-me-off to anything admirable someone has to say
about him?
The book is of classical importance to history buffs and
teachers, diplomats, and politicians because Eizenstat reports meticulously recorded
conversations with backdrop and context to their import. His writing is simple
and forthright offers tantalizing possibilities for readers to comprehend the
nuances of events shaping the world.
The book is an authoritative accounting about President
Carter’s human rights agenda, the Egypt-Israel peace negotiations, Panama Canal
negotiations, the Soviets slog in Afghanistan, the Iranian revolution, the
fight to free Soviet Jewry, and stories about how and why Carter missed out on
a second term. The book is Eizenstat’s memoir as much a biography of Carter’s
term in office. Eizenstat cannot overcome his outsize rapture for being an
insider in the throes of power as Chief White House Advisor
on Domestic Policy. Eizenstat’s enthusiasm for almost everything is
understandable but inexcusable. He demonstrates in the book he knows Carter, to
paraphrase another author, “slipped and slithered steadily down in fetid
foulness” of religious-based anti-Semitism, arrested development for the State
of Israel, and a total lack of respect and cold-hearted attitude for Menachem
Begin.
We Had Our Doubts
Carter’s fundamental religious beliefs framed his campaign, political
and public policy decisions. That bothered a lot of us Democratic voters at the
time. So did his rural, peanut-farming background. His homey Southern drawl
made him sound like a supplicant rather than a stentorian leading light.
Our concerns all seemed to come true when the nation fell
into deep domestic troubles under his watch. In the late 1970’s, it was a
struggle for us college graduates to find good jobs. Interest rates skyrocketed
and mortgages were slippery. My 1981
home mortgage was made at an interest rate topping 14%, and I said, “thank you”
to the one savings and loan officer willing to make the mortgage.
Eizenstat liberally paints Jimmy and Rosalynn Carters as
gentle folk with no rough edges. They were inclusive at a time Southerners were
predominantly still racists. Eizenstat pictures the Carters as loving,
respectful, morally untainted, and idealistic. He and his sweetheart, wife and
partner, Rosalynn, “disdained politics.”
The author admits others hold the memory of Mr. Carter as a
“weak and hapless president.” In her Foreword to the book, Madeleine Albright
sends kudos to Eizenstat for making “a compelling case that Carter’s four years
in the White House deserve far more credit than he generally receives.” Senator
Robert Dole is quoted echoing Carter’s diminished legacy that in time will be viewed
more generously. Paul Volker’s words about Carter are hardly effusive when
reflecting on “The Great Stagflation” during the Carter administration.
Eizenstat claims, though Carter was not a great president,
“He has more than redeemed himself as an admired public figure by his
post-presidential role as a diplomatic mediator and election monitor, public
health defender, and human rights advocate.” Carter’s post-presidency television image to
me is of a hammer-slinging builder of houses for the poor, and elder global
advocate for human rights. Yet, 32% of the population in his home state of
Georgia is living in poverty, and while Carter is building houses around the
world, 28% of the poor in his state are children living in ramshackle, tarpaper
& chicken wire shacks as I saw on a road trip across the rural South.
Liberal or
Conservative
Eizenstat’s devotion and admiration seem untethered. First,
his characterization of the Carters is not borne out by machinations reported
in the book about early state campaigns for office and Carter’s run for
Governor. Eizenstat relates how Carter purposely took actions to convince white
voters he was giving short shrift to black community demands. He wanted to come
across as a moderate. Carter visited a segregated academy with all its
symbolism pledging support for all-white private schools. When asked his
heroes, Carter never mentioned Dr. Martin Luther King. Carter extolled the
value of ethnic and racial neighborhoods. He publicly promised whites not to
use government power to “break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis or inject
black families into a white neighborhood just to create some sort of
integration.” He pridefully declared he was now able to win the governorship
“without a single black vote” Eizenstat relates.
Second, Eizenstat is an Orthodox Jew and a heartfelt Israel
supporter. His former boss carries on post-presidency mendacious attacks
against Israel. Carter’s antipathy for Israel has created a toxic & demeaning environment coining the anti-Israel
eponymous “the apartheid nation.” His attacks spearhead the global apartheid-nation
movement that solely attacks Israel. Carter gives gravitas to the global rise
in anti-Semitism perhaps as an unintended consequence of his fire hose torrent
of accusations but for which he takes no responsibility. That’s how Jewish
memory keepers will memorialize the Carter legacy and the man.
Camp David
The third concern about Eizenstat’s devotion to Carter is
revealed in his inside revelations about Camp David negotiations. The book is
at its best in a thorough, detailed and enthralling retelling of behind-the-scenes
conversations, strategies, and impacts of personalities, when President Carter
dragoons Begin and Sadat into a peace accord. He tells about Carter’s “love
affair with the Saudis.” Sadat is the
“shining light,” peacemaker, friend and ally of Washington. Menachem
Begin is an unbending, unforgiving, nationalist, himself a terrorist, and
puppeteers of the American Jewish lobby. An exasperated Eizenstat writes, “The
president’s lack of political sensitivity was sometimes breathtaking.”
Carter’s opinions and actions are anything but banal. They
seem predestined by Carter’s spiritual religious fundamentalism. Eizenstat
leaves the reader thinking the Jews never had a chance at a fair and impartial
intercession with President Carter the linchpin in negotiations between Jews
and Arabs.
Palestinians are a conquered and occupied, poor and downtrodden
People for whom Christ would advocate, President Carter seemingly believes. The
Palestinians want normal lives, “but the Israeli military treats them worse
than the white police treat blacks.” The Palestinians “suffered for many, many
years,” Carter tells Prime Minister Rabin, and deserve a “homeland.” In
President Carter’s mind, the homeland is parity. He equates the statelessness
of Jews, slaughtered by Christians, persecuted and expelled from nation after
nation for 2,000 years with Palestinians displaced for six decades after losing
repeated wars against the Jews. Palestinians cling to the hope of driving the
Jews into the Sea. Other Presidents give
away cufflinks and glasses aboard the President’s jet. President Carter gave
special guests a “personally autographed Bible with ‘Air Force One’ embossed on
the front.”
Eizenstat tells a story reporting how deeply felt, in his
crevices and fissures, is his spirit and policies shaped by religion. President Carter is a sermonizer. Even as
President, he loves teaching scripture and retelling Biblical stories. He told
a Bible study group during a campaign about Christ driving the moneylenders
from the Temple leading to Christ’s crucifixion. “There was no possible way,”
Carter was quoted telling parishioners, “for the Jewish leaders to avoid the
challenge, so they decided to kill Jesus.” That made newspaper headlines.
Begin hung tough in all negotiations. He was a Holocaust
survivor and cared little for the opinions of gentiles. He was a survivor of
British colonialists in Palestine who armed and trained the Arabs. Begin was a
survivor of pre-State terrorist attacks against Jews. Begin was a survivor of Britain’s
and America’s Foreign Service Arab-lovers, who re-incarcerated concentration
camp survivors into barbed wire detention centers. Begin was a survivor of efforts
to strangle the fledgling Jewish democratic state when the U. S. and virtually
every Western nation sanctioned Israel from financial aid and arms while
lavishing emoluments Arab, Nazi-sympathizing despots. Begin was a witness to
repeated miracles that saved the remnants of his People from multi-Arab
nations’ wars of annihilation.
Getting It…Or Not
But Mr. Begin knew with whom he was dealing. His fierce
visage of peace for Israel with Egypt was an irenic opportunity for long-term
security. Egypt reclaimed its identity by forging links to the West through the
negotiations and return of all of Sinai with its beaches and its gushing oil
wells. Carter never got a Palestinian homeland or the Nobel Peace Prize awarded
to Begin and Sadat; however, it was the
workaholic doggedness of Mr. Carter, and all three wives,
who made peace a reality. Tens of thousands of Jewish and Muslim children are
alive with no more war between Egypt and Israel leaving other Arab nations
afraid to take Israel on alone.
Deep in negotiation with the Egyptians, Eizenstat relates
scene after scene detailing Carter’s exasperation, frustration and downright dislike
for Begin and his Jewish negotiators. Carter blamed the Jews but it was Carter
who didn’t get it saying, “It’s hard to understand their motivation.” Carter
never got it then or today.
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