Was Jimmy Carter an Anti-Semite?
The strange legacy of our 39th president
This is a guest post from the JPF family by Jeffrey Kass, author of Black Batwoman v. White Jesus: and other essays from the anti-racism collection.
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Was Jimmy Carter an Anti-Semite?
Yesterday, President Jimmy Carter died at age 100.
Students of history will remember Carter as one of the worst presidents in modern history.
He’s the president who presided over double-digit inflation, extremely slow economic growth, high unemployment, 22% interest rates, $5-per-gallon gas (which would be like $10 today) and even gas shortages. I remember the long gas lines as a kid. And of course the Iran Hostage Crisis and Carter’s botched rescue attempt.
Americans don’t agree on much, but B-actor Ronald Reagan won 44 states when Carter was up for re-election. It was the first time in 30 years Republicans won control of the Senate. Carter’s failures paved the way for today’s Republican party.
Some of us of course remember one of Carter’s rare achievements: a previously unthinkable peace agreement between Israel and Egypt after the two countries fought wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The Camp David Accords not only prevented more war but today remains stronger than ever, with Egypt and Israel cooperating on higher levels than ever imagined. Egypt has even asked Israel to help attack ISIS terrorist targets in the Sinai Peninsula on several occasions.
Post presidency, Carter established the Carter Center to support humanitarian efforts. He’s done tremendous work through Habitat for Humanity, constructing homes for people too poor to buy them. He led the effort to almost eradicate the guinea worm that has plagued millions (3.5 million had the parasite in the 80s; 13 people had it in 2022).
We should applaud those efforts.
The popular line on Carter is that he was an awful president but a model former president.
Yet beneath Carter’s do-gooder persona was an obsession with Israel that caused many in the Jewish community to wonder if he was to the core a Jew hater.
In Carter’s widely criticized book about Israel and the Palestinians, he suggested Palestinians should stop suicide bombings as soon as Israel accepts a peace plan. In other words, Carter essentially wrote that it was acceptable to blow up children to achieve statehood.
That book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” while justifiably sensitive to Palestinian suffering as we all should be, trivializes the murder of Israelis, ignores any Jewish connection to the land of Israel (peculiar since Carter was a self-described born-again Christian) and then pretends Israel has zero legitimate concerns about its safety and security.
Carter’s book also ignored that Israel completely withdrew (unilaterally) from Gaza in 2005, and when Hamas came to power, instead of nation-building, spent its money on rockets to launch at civilian neighborhoods in Israel. Almost two decades later Hamas did little more than prepare for war. The proof is in the bloody pudding.
Adding insult to injury, during the many times he was questioned about his book, Carter doubled down and instead of answering criticism just went straight to the false, anti-Jewish stereotypes of Jewish control of the media. You expect to hear that kind of cancel nonsense from David Duke — but a former president? Ok, maybe one other president comes to mind.
Some of the most respectable book reviewers severely criticized Carter’s book. Michael Kinsley (not Jewish) called it “moronic.” The Economist (not Jewish or favorable to Israel) labeled it “simplistic and one-sided as charged.”
Over a dozen business and civic leaders resigned from the Carter Center’s advisory board to protest Carter’s lopsided attacks on Israel.
Even pro-Carter book reviewer Joseph Lelyveld of The New York Review of Books pointed out that Carter’s use of “apartheid” was “basically a slogan, not reasoned argument.”
Carter barely used the charged word in his book, except of course in the title, and didn’t even define it. Worse, on page 189 of the book, Carter finally acknowledged that the issues of division between Israel and Palestine are not the same as apartheid South Africa. Duh.
Let’s be honest. Carter intentionally used the term “apartheid” to rally people against Israel. We call that defamation.
We all know that apartheid is a system of segregation based on race, and it’s not just a word used to describe every type of injustice.
Israel isn’t engaging in apartheid. Almost 20% of Israeli citizens are of the same Arab race. An Arab sat on Israel’s Supreme Court, and the last Israeli government included Arab Muslims in high positions. Arabs in Israel are doctors and lawyers and business owners. There’s even been an Arab Miss Israel. Muslim women in hijabs can be found on the same busses and walking the same beaches as Jewish Israelis.
None of that was the case during South Africa’s Apartheid.
This is not to say that Palestinians living in the West Bank or Gaza enjoy freedoms like Arabs in Israel do. They don’t. But Apartheid wouldn’t have differentiated between Arabs.
So what motivated a person like Carter to take such an unbalanced view of Israel?
We know from Hamas that massacres, kidnappings, rapes, and rockets will never advance peace despite campus protestors’ calls to the contrary. We know that Israel has many times offered peace agreements that Palestinians rejected. Bill Clinton in his own book said he was dumbfounded when Yasir Arafat rejected a final peace deal that would have given the Palestinians their own country.
Of course, it’s not anti-Jewish to advocate for a Palestinian state. It’s not Jew-hating to point out that in 1977, when Carter was president, there were only about 5,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank but today that number is past 500,000, which by any calculation makes a peace deal that much more difficult. Shame on Israel.
It’s not anti-Jewish to strive for a Palestinian State existing side by side with Israel in peace. It’s not Jew-hating to be disgusted by Israeli military abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank. It’s not Jew-hating to call out Israel when it does wrong. I certainly have many times, especially under Netanyahu.
But the dispute between Israel and Palestine isn’t about skin tone. It’s a conflict between two people who love and have a connection to the same land and haven’t figured out a way to share it fairly. And believe me, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
Still, Carter went far beyond Palestinian advocacy to the point of lying about Israel.
Once on MSNBC, he described conditions for Palestinians (long before the October 2023 Hamas massacre) as “one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation” in the world. When the interviewer pressed that absurd notion with “Worse than Rwanda?” (referring to the 1994 genocide), Carter said he didn’t want to discuss the “ancient history” of Rwanda. Not sure when 1994 became ancient, but ok.
He responded similarly when the interviewer brought up other examples of genocide.
No matter how many times it’s repeated, there’s no genocide of Palestinians. Nor is Israel’s aggressive retaliation of Hamas’ savagery aimed at eradicating the Palestinian people.
This isn’t to minimize civilian death, which is tragic, but if Israel truly wanted to commit genocide, the numbers would be exponentially higher. Instead of 1 or 2 civilians to every 1 or 2 combatants killed, it would be more like 10 civilians for every Hamas member like it was when the U.S. attacked Iraq.
The Palestinian population under Israeli control has increased by hundreds of percent in 50 years. We’re talking population explosion not the eradication of a population. By definition, genocide means the opposite.
In his sort-of defense, Carter always seemed to side with the weaker party in a conflict, notwithstanding facts or any morality.
Carter was the one who tried to install the exiled Khmer Rouge as the rightful government of Cambodia even though they slaughtered one out of every three Cambodians in the 1975–78 genocide.
Carter several times legitimized Fidel Castro and even took his side in a bio-weapons dispute with the United States. The same Fidel who used firing squads on his own people.
Carter praised North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung with the words: “I find him to be vigorous, intelligent . . . and in charge of the decisions about this country.” No, that wasn’t Trump. That was Carter. So there’s no confusion, Kim Il, and later his son, starved to death 3 million of their own people. Still, “I don’t see that they (the North Koreans) are an outlaw nation,” Carter once remarked.
Carter even once bizarrely said that former Yugoslavian communist dictator Joseph Tito, who executed and exiled people who disagreed with him, was “a man who believes in human rights.”
Carter gave high marks to murderous Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, saying that “our goals are the same: to have a just system of economics and politics . . . We believe in enhancing human rights.”
You would think, then, that Carter’s stance on Israel was just the same sort of morally bankrupt thinking. Maybe it was. Yet concerning the Jewish ancestral homeland, Carter’s underdog obsession seemed a bit stronger. He never wrote books on those other conflicts.
Plus, so there’s no mistaking Carter’s true feelings, he’s advocated for Hamas — a savage terror organization if you’ve been paying attention— to be recognized as a legitimate political partner by Israel. Even the latest war with Hamas, the Carter Center, just one day after Hamas’ terror attacks that killed 1,200 Israeli civilians, couldn’t muster more than a feeble statement condemning the killing of civilians on both sides. That was before Israel even launched its attack back.
Yet Carter never called for the world to recognize the legitimacy of Al Qaida or the Taliban. Nor did he ever suggest that Nigeria recognize the legitimacy of Boko Haram, the murderous Islamic extremist terror group that’s kidnapped and raped young girls.
According to Carter, Jews were the only group obligated to recognize a terror organization whose very charter calls for the complete annihilation of Israel:
“Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.”
Carter for decades downplayed any real Jewish connection to their homeland. He took the position that only Israel, not the Palestinians, needed to make changes to make peace.
Carter’s book, which I read twice, reads more like a book of insults and name-calling than any scholarly or honest discussion that addresses the depth of the Israel-Palestine dispute. And then to top it off, Carter responded to Jewish criticism using tired, anti-Jewish tropes.
Some in Carter’s inner circle have relayed Carter’s anti-Jewish comments outside of the Israel context, but we’ll never know the veracity of those comments since Carter denies making them.
We’ll never know for sure Carter’s true feelings about Jews, but given his obsession with Israel, if it walks like an anti-Jewish duck, it’s probably an anti-Jewish duck.
Still, the lesson for us in Carter’s interesting legacy isn’t really about our former president. It’s that all of us should stop approaching so many issues as either-or propositions. We don’t need to choose whether to be pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian. We can and should be both.
We can acknowledge, as President Obama repeatedly has, the Jews’ factually irrefutable deep connection to their ancestral homeland and origin story in Israel. We can demand that Palestinians stop using terror as a vehicle for so-called peace. And that they stop advancing Holocaust denial and other anti-Jewish themes in their textbooks. We can reject rape of Jewish women as a means to achieve Palestinian statehood.
At the same time, we can and must demand that Israel, which we obviously know has far more power than the Palestinians, stop expanding settlements and direct all efforts to achieve a final peace deal with the Palestinians.
We can and should demand that Israel treat its Palestinian cousins with more respect and stop allowing its police or military to abuse them in the name of stopping terror. We must bring to justice Israelis living in the West Bank who attack and harass Palestinians.
Israel has brought us amazing innovation. From the cell phone to the Waze app to self-driving cars.
Well, time to use that innovation for peace.
Too bad Jimmy Carter didn’t get behind that.
Mr. Kass,
You too are unjustly hard on Jews and far too forgiving of so called Palestinians. Would you have Israelis negotiating a peace plan with people who won’t acknowledge a Jewish state as a fair starting place in a proposal?
In short, Carter was a disaster with few redeeming qualities. R.I.P. antisemite, probably not in heaven