What Jimmy Carter has to teach Donald Trump about peace in the Middle East
The late president was a controversial leader. But we still have much to learn from him
Former President Jimmy Carter and President-elect Donald Trump may not share much — but that doesn’t mean there’s no common ground to be found. Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Eva Marie Uzcategui/Getty Images)
Jeremy Ben-Ami January 3, 2025
Almost 50 years ago, I spent a high school summer volunteering for former President Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. Carter, who passed away last weekend at 100, was a controversial figure for some in the Jewish community, but a role model for me. He truly embodied what it means to lead a life devoted to public service.
His legacy and teaching extend as well to the core area of my work — the search for Middle East peace. While it’s fair to be skeptical that there might be much common ground between Carter and President-elect Donald Trump, there are a number of lessons from Carter’s legacy that it would be worth the incoming team considering.
History — and peace between long standing enemies — requires leadership
The personal engagement of leaders willing to shape public opinion — and not be intimidated by it — is essential to the task of changing history. Think of Nelson Mandela and Willem DeKlerk, who together forged a path toward the end of apartheid in South Africa; or of Mikhail Gorbachev and President Ronald Reagan, who laid the groundwork for the end of the Cold War and meaningful nuclear weapons reductions.
Carter and his partners in seeking change, Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, certainly all met the moment during the 13 days in September 1978 when they came together at Camp David to forge a pact for peace between Israel and Egypt.
Today’s leaders — American, Palestinian and Israeli — have in recent memory been far too timid when it comes to finding a lasting solution for peace. They have been far too constrained by their sense of what they can do politically, rather than what needs to be done for the sake of their people and the future.
Hence, lesson number one: the Trump team must work to bring to the fore and empower strong, visionary leaders regionally and locally who can change and shape public opinion. Who will be this generation’s Sadat, going to Jerusalem in 1977 to kickstart the peace process? Trump has the opportunity to find and enable them, and should do so.
The stakes of the moment — and the opportunities — need to be spelled out for the publics involved
Carter had his biggest falling out with the Jewish community and Israel’s supporters over the title of his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
I believe he came, with time, to see how his choice to use the “A” word served to shut down some of the very conversations he hoped to spark, particularly for Jews around the world who had been on the forefront of fighting apartheid in South Africa, and couldn’t conceive that such could be the future for their beloved “lone democracy in the Middle East.”
But Carter was right about something: The stakes of Israel’s approach to Palestinians would define the Jewish state’s future, as has become glaringly clear during the war in Gaza. Now, the “A” word is increasingly in common use — even by some Israelis and friends of the country, who more and more see the fork in the road Israel faces in the way Carter did.
Whether Carter’s choice of language was appropriate or not, he saw that Israel had a historic choice to make. The country can’t effectively control all the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea and remain a democracy with a Jewish majority. There are now more non-Jews than Jews in that land. In the long term, Israel has only three options: Give all 15 million people equal rights; agree to a two-state solution; or give up being a democracy and admit that millions of non-Jews are going to be permanently deprived of their rights.
If Israel chooses the path of a 15 million person democracy, it will realistically lose much of its Jewish character. If it decides to give full rights to only one ethnic group and fewer rights to others, it loses its democratic soul — and with it, I would argue, its Jewish one.
This is the existential conundrum that Carter was trying to get Israel’s supporters to face up to after his decades of work to resolve the conflict, both as president and in his subsequent career. Almost 20 years later, the choice he articulated still has to be made; there is no way out of doing so.
So, the second lesson for the incoming administration is that a long-lasting peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will require friends outside the conflict to help the parties themselves see the existential choice they face between perpetual conflict and the difficult compromises necessary for peace.
Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires regional engagement
A final piece of wisdom that President Carter could pass along to the new team is that there is no “solution” — no road to peace — without dealing with the Palestinian question. Carter already knew that back in the late 1970s, as he tried, but was ultimately unable, to include meaningful steps related to the Palestinians in the Sinai peace deal.
Former President George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, understood this too — and they convened the Madrid Conference, the first-ever meeting of all the parties directly involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict. After Bush, former President Bill Clinton and his team made the decision to leave regional stakeholders out of conversations between the Israelis and Palestinians — and I believe that is one critical reason they could not bring the Oslo Accords to fruition at Camp David II in 2000.
Former President George W. Bush and his secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, tried — albeit a bit too late — to re-engage regional partners at Annapolis in 2007, and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert is still promoting the deal that flowed from that process today.
Carter lived through it all. I was fortunate to have the chance to talk with him and his aides about some of these efforts. He regretted to the end that in 1978 and 1979 he couldn’t get the Palestinian issue meaningfully addressed as part of the Sinai agreement. He would continue to urge his successors that there would be no way to get to the end of conflict in the Middle East if the core issue of Palestinian rights wasn’t being addressed.
It would do the incoming Trump team well to heed that advice, as it thinks how best to build on the Abraham Accords in a second term.
Sadly, Carter never did realize his dream to see a just and peaceful end to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. Neither did he get to see what choice the modern state of Israel and the Jewish people will eventually make at the fork in the road that he so controversially framed in his 2006 book. But he leaves behind some valuable lessons for those who hope, following in his footsteps, to resolve this seemingly irresolvable conflict.
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