Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - What Happened to Jimmy Carter? - with Ken Stein

Episode Date: January 10, 2025

Watch Call me Back on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@CallMeBackPodcastTo contact us, sign up for updates, and access transcripts, visit: https://arkmedia.org/Dan on X: https://x.com/dansenorDan on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dansenor Yesterday in Washington D.C., former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s funeral service was held at the National Cathedral.  The former president’s post-presidential legacy has had a lasting impact on today’s Middle East. President Carter was known for brokering the Egypt-Israel peace treaty between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, which has lasted over four decades. However, he was also the first national leader of his stature to openly embrace Hamas, to accuse Israel of “apartheid”, and to legitimize Hamas’s slaughtering of Jews through suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism, during and following the Second Intifada.  How did President Carter go from an engaged diplomat working for peace between Israel and Egypt to championing Hamas and its narrative of Israeli “apartheid”?  To discuss the paradox of President Carter when it comes to Israel, and his impact on current day events in the Middle East, our guest is Ken Stein.  Dr. Kenneth W. Stein was a close confidante of President Carter’s, with whom he co-authored books and papers on the Middle East. Ken ran The Carter Center at Emory University, where he was also the Middle East Fellow. He also ran the Israel Studies Department at Emory. He has published numerous books and scholarly articles.  “Making Peace Among Arabs and Israelis: Lessons from Fifty Years of Negotiating Experience”, authored by Ken: https://www.amazon.com/Making-peace-among-Arabs-Israelis/dp/B002X78MGW Book discussed in this episode: https://tinyurl.com/4h7pmwzf Recent article by Ken Stein: https://m.jpost.com/international/article-835320

Carter was captivated. He was slain. He was addicted to trying to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli and the Arab-Israeli conflict because he thought he could, he thought he should, and he thought he was not given the chance to do so because he lost to Ronald Reagan. I can't tell you how many times he said to me, at least half a dozen, throughout the 1980s, if they'd only give me a chance, I can do this. I said, what do you mean? He said If they'd only give me a chance, I can do this. I said, what do you mean? He said, if they only give me a chance to get back into mediation, I can make a difference.

I said, Mr. President, Arafat is not Sadat, and the West Bank is not Sinai. And he'd go, oh, come on, this can be done. So when he comes out with Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid, he had evolved into this frustration that his successors had not done what he had done. But successors didn't have a bag in New York City. It's 2 o'clock a.m. on Friday, January 10th in Israel as Israelis transition to a new day.

Earlier today in Washington, D.C. at the National Cathedral was the funeral service for former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. In a recent episode of this podcast, I provided some pretty tough, although in my view well-deserved, commentary and criticism on President Carter's post-presidential legacy's impact on today's Middle East. He was the first national leader of his stature to openly embrace Hamas and accuse Israel of apartheid and legitimize Hamas' slaughtering of Jews through suicide bombings and other forms of terrorism during and after the Second Intifada. In that commentary in one of our episodes a couple weeks ago, I did say that we would

return to President Carter's legacy in the Middle East. Alon thought I was a little too harsh on President Carter and we needed to provide the full spectrum of his legacy. So I said we'd come back and give his record a more fulsome analysis. After all, he was the president who midwived the Egypt-Israel peace treaty between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, which has lasted over four decades. In fact, it has even survived October 7th and the last year and many months. Here from today's funeral is Stu Eisenstadt,

President Carter's longtime friend and advisor, who was a top advisor in the Carter White House and went all the way back with Carter to his days as governor of Georgia. Here's Stu eulogizing his former boss at today's funeral. He was the first president to light a Hanukkah menorah. He created the U. the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, which I have the honor of sharing. He had a kosher Shabbat dinner at Camp David for the Israeli delegation and came to our

house for a Passover Seder, only weeks after he negotiated the treaty between Israel and Egypt. Jimmy Carter's most lasting achievement, and the one I think he was most proud of, was to bring the first peace to the Middle East through the greatest act of personal diplomacy in American history, the Camp David Accords. So when you listen to Stu's chronicling of President Carter's accomplishments and legacy, how does one account for President Carter's dramatic turn against Israel and the Jewish people after he left the White House?

How did he go from engaged diplomat working for peace between Israel and Egypt to champion for Hamas and its narrative of Israeli quote-unquote apartheid. To help us try to understand the paradox of Carter when it comes to Israel and the impact it has had on even today's events, we are joined by Ken Stein, who was a close confidant of President Carter's. Ken co-authored books and papers on the Middle East

with President Carter. Ken ran the Carter Center at Emory University, where he was also the Middle East Fellow at the Carter Center. He traveled to Israel and throughout the Middle East with President Carter on numerous occasions. He also ran the Israel Studies Department at Emory University, where the Carter Center

was located. Ken has published numerous books and scholarly articles in his own name as well, one book I highly recommend, Making Peace Among Arabs and Israelis, Lessons from 50 Years of Negotiating Experience. We'll post that book and a couple of others that we discuss in this episode in the show notes. Ken Stein helps us answer, what happened to Jimmy Carter? This is Call Me Back.

And I'm pleased to welcome to Call Me Back for the first time, Ken Stein, who joins us from Atlanta. Ken, thanks for being here. Thank you for having me, Dan. Ken, I want to start with your understanding of what had shaped Jimmy Carter's thinking about Israel, about the Middle East as he became president or as he was getting ready to become president.

You know, we often wonder when presidents come into power. Some of them have long histories of working in Congress or working in other positions as vice president or what have you. So we have some basis upon which to understand how they're coming at the issue of foreign policy generally in Israel specifically. Here with Jimmy Carter, he'd been a one-term governor. What was the basis for his worldview as it related to Israel in the Middle East? I think his connection to the Middle East came from being a person who studied the Bible,

a person of faith, and an individual who believed that conflicts could be resolved. That he derived from growing up in South Georgia and trying to mediate in his own mind the distance between integration and segregation. And Carter throughout his career as governor and then as president and afterwards, always was interested in bringing people together and he thought he had a formidable ability to be the mediator to make that happen. I think Carter was more of a biblical scholar than he was a person who was familiar with Middle Eastern politics or political culture.

Many people have written biographies of Carter and they've all agreed that there was nowhere in his run for governor or his run for the presidency where he made a particular point of when I become president, I want to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. I think that evolved probably by the end of 76, and then Vance Brzezinski joined him and committed themselves to trying to find a resolution to the conflict in a comprehensive way. So it's interesting, you say that Carter viewed the issue of Israel in the Middle East in terms that in some way were parallel to his experience of what he lived and saw firsthand in the civil rights south in the United States. Is that right? I mean, he really saw this as, because we've talked about that sometimes on this

podcast how so many of those who get the Middle East and Israel wrong today, including fierce critics of Israel tend to view it in the context of America's history of race relations and they want to almost like plaster our own domestic policy experiences, challenges, tensions, sometimes outright confrontations onto other countries and onto other societies, in this case Israel. Was that his framework? Jimmy Carter didn't like obstacles in his path of decision making. He didn't like elites.

He didn't like lobbying groups. He didn't like anyone had intruded into his ability to make decisions. And for Brzezinski, his national security advisor, the Columbia professor who followed Henry Kissinger, the Harvard professor, Brzezinski believed that Israel had too much influence over American foreign policy. He even decided it was important to reduce the influence of AIPAC. He decided to put forth before the Congress in 1978 the so-called package deal where Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Israel would receive advanced fighter equipment.

And he made it quite clear, Dan, he made it quite clear, Carter did and Brzezinski did, that if you don't allow Egypt and Saudi Arabia to get their weapons, Israel won't cut theirs. That created a lot of consternation in the American Jewish community that they felt somehow that Israel was not going to be able to sustain its qualitative military advantage. It wasn't yet defined as that, but it would be defined as that by Reagan in the 80s. He took from Brzezinski, Brzezinski's idea from the Brookings Institution that was developed in 1975, the Brookings Plan, which essentially said Israel should withdraw to the 67 borders. There should be a comprehensive resolution to the conflict and something should be done

for the Palestinians so they can express themselves. What entered his mind is, this is something I want to do, this is something we're going to do, this is something that my national security counselor wants us to do, and we're going to do this together. Now remember, Carter came to the presidency without too much foreign policy experience. Did he have any? Well, someone's described he had as much foreign policy experience as any president since Calvin Coolidge, in other words, he had none. Right. That's a pretty harsh statement. But the reality is, I don't know the governors who come to office like a Bush or Clinton

or Reagan or Carter, come to office with great foreign policy knowledge. You prefaced your question by saying, why did he choose to do this? Well, I think he chose to do it not because he was a Washington insider, not because he knew how the State Department operated, not because he knew political cultures. He did it because he was motivated, because he thought he could do it and he could get it done. And that's why he stuck with this idea of a Geneva conference of a comprehensive peace for so long, even after Sadat went to Jerusalem in November of 77. Okay. So we're going to get to that. When you say Bush, you mean George W. Bush, meaning governors,

these governors who become president. Yes, sir. Lawrence Wright, who wrote this very good book, even though I disagree with some of it, called 13 Days in September, the Dramatic Story of the Struggle for Peace, which is about the Camp David negotiating process, talks about a trip in his book,

he talks about a trip that President Carter took, I think it was in 1973 to Israel, it was his first trip he had ever been to Israel Interestingly, it was before the Yom Kippur war Golda Meir was prime minister She lent him a station wagon a Mercedes station wagon and a driver so he could drive around the country He was middle of his term as governor I guess of Georgia Any sense or did he ever talk to you about the impression that experience made on him that shaped some of this approach that you're describing? I think it was his first visit to Israel, so probably the Israelis probably put on a pretty good schedule for him to go visit some of the Christian holy sites, be it in Beth dips his hands in the Jordan River and he talks a lot about, it was heavy on Christian biblical sightseeing.

So, for him, that trip gave him a tangible reality of this is the Middle East, because what he had studied in the Bible, he could see these are the places that currently exist. And for that, that mattered to him. It wasn't just a document. The Bible wasn't just a document. There was a certain reality that came to life after that trip. So it's one thing for a president to say, you know, my administration is going to move the needle on Middle East peace, quote unquote. It's quite another for a president to say, my administration is going to move the needle on Middle East peace and I the president am gonna invest personally my political capital my

geopolitical capital I'm gonna get really directly involved which was actually you know you mentioned that as big followed Henry Kissinger as national security advisor that was not the Kissinger approach when Kissinger was national security advisor and Secretary of State he played the primary role he was the one shuttle diplomacy you know after the Umkipur War, traveling all over the region, personally getting involved. It wasn't Nixon. I mean, Nixon obviously made some very important decisions, but it was not Nixon's direct engagement. In fact, I can't think of a president since either before or since Carter that got so directly involved in the details.

So again, it's one thing to say my administration is going to make its mark. It's another thing for the president to expend the kind of time and energy, which is scarce when you're president, that he did. I think Bill Clinton tried in his Camp David II in 2000. That's an entirely different question. But when he came to office in January of 1977, I don't think he realized how deeply engaged he would become. I think his first goal was to try and meet the leaders of the region, bring them to Washington, find out what each one of them was thinking. And he thought he could persuade each one of them to come along with him in the search

for a comprehensive Middle East peace. Rabin comes to Washington in March, and Carter describes the meeting with him as one of the most difficult meetings he's had with any Israeli prime minister. And Rabin writes, I was astonished that Carter wanted to represent our security interests. But to be clear, Rabin at this point is prime minister. And Rabin writes, I was astonished that Carter wanted to represent our security interests. But to be clear, Rabin at this point is prime minister. He succeeds Golda Meir. In March of 77, that is correct. And I think Carter is now realizing that some of these leaders aren't necessarily full-fledged behind his effort to try and make a difference. Right after Rabin leaves, Carter goes to Clinton, Massachusetts

in response to a question. He says there should be a homeland for the Palestinians. And the Israelis and the Jordanians went, what? So this is President Carter meets with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 1977, in the White House. Carter goes to Clinton, Massachusetts. There was some kind of forum he was speaking at. Is that right? It was a town hall meeting and it was probably about a week later.

Right. And according to various books about the Carter presidency, this was not scripted. This was not well thought out. It's not like it had gone through the whole interagency process. Carter basically, I don't know if he was improvising or in the moment, dropped what now, we hear the term all the time, now a homeland for the Palestinians, a Palestinian state, a two state solution.

These are concepts that's just part of our, has been at least, I think probably up until October 7th, part of the overall discussion about diplomacy in the Middle East. But when Carter dropped that in Clinton, Massachusetts, it was unheard of, and to your point, it was unheard of to the Israelis, it was unheard of to the Jordanian leadership, and it was unheard of. And to your point, it was unheard of to the Israelis, it was unheard of to the Jordanian

leadership, and it was unheard of to US policymakers. Except the PLO was meeting at the time, and Carter may have been signaling to Arafat and the PLO executive committee, we want you to join us in negotiations. And one of the informal networks that Carter had established with the PLO, and PLO wanted some sort of indication of America's seriousness, that's not unusual for a public statement to be made in order to send a message to a leader abroad. And later on we get confirmation that that is in fact what the PLO executive committee wanted to hear, but RFID couldn't persuade them to move forward and think about negotiations, even in an indirect way with the United States, let alone accept UN Resolution 242 and all the

other hoops that they might have to go through. Carter did vet the term homeland through Vice President Mondale and through a US State Department desk officer, a guy by the name of Nick Veliotis. Veliotis got a call in the morning on the day that the homeland idea was dropped, and he wanted to know if the United States had ever used the term in any political statement. And Veliotis said no. Of course, Veliotis didn't know that Carter was going to do that later on that day or the day after. But Veliotis told me that story because I asked him. I said, so what did you know about Homeland

and the whole idea? He said, well, Carter called me that morning. And this was my response. OK. So Carter makes that comment at the town hall in Clint, Massachusetts, 1977. By the way, just as a side note, as someone who's worked

in the federal government, the idea of a desk officer at the State Department just getting a call from the president is like a snapshot of another time. But that's typical of Carter. Explain. If Carter didn't have an answer, he was going to go directly to the person.

He wasn't going to go through channels. He was going to ask someone. Someone said, so who's the most important person at the State Department at this particular moment? And someone said, Nicholas Veliotis. He'd been number two in Israel during the 73 war. And number two meaning the deputy chief of mission at the embassy. Correct.

Yeah. Okay. All right. So now I want to go to, this is going to sound like a very technical point I'm getting into, but I think it's an extremely important point with relevance for today. President Carter had a vision for a regional solution to the Israeli Arab conflict. That is to say that it wasn't that Israel was going to sign a peace treaty with this country or that country.

It was that Israel was going to sign a comprehensive peace treaty, multilateral with many, all of the Arab countries in the Middle East, most of them. And there was going to be this summit in Geneva. When was the summit supposed to be? 1978? The end of September, 77. End of September, 77. Okay, so late 77.

And this was summit in Geneva and Anwar Sadat was supposed to be there, president of Egypt, and Hafez al-Assad was supposed to be there, the president of Syria. They were the two biggest players in the Middle East up to that point. They were the two pointy ends of the spear on the major regional wars against Israel, the 73 Yom Kippur War, the Six Day War. So Assad and Sadat were the 800-pound guerrillas, if you will, in the Arab world. And Carter's view was, I'm going to midwife a deal between Israel and all of them. And the leader in the region, who was not on board with that, was the president of Egypt, was Sadat. He was not interested in a

comprehensive deal. He wanted his own bilateral deal with Israel. So I guess my first question is why did Sadat want to break from the region and cut his own deal with Israel? Sadat had been cultivated very successfully by Henry Kissinger after the 73 war. Kissinger brought together the Geneva Conference of December 73. It was precooked between Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, and Sadat. There would be a disengagement agreement between Israel and Egypt after the 1973 war, disengagement meaning that their armies would disengage from one another in Sinai.

When Kissinger shows up in Aswan to negotiate the last, I don't know, kilometers or whatever it would be in the disengagement, Sadat tells his chief of staff, General Gamase, he said, General Gamase, we're going to have 30 tanks on the Israel side of the canal. And Gamase, who had just planned this war, said, Mr. President, you can't. We walked so hard for this, we should have 180 tanks, 200 tanks, whatever it was. And the president of Egypt turns to his chief of staff

and said, my near general, this is not what we're going to do. And Gamase leaves the tent, comes back, and he looks at Sadat and said, Mr. President, I'm sorry I walked out. And Sadat then turns to Gamassi and says, General Gamassi, we're not making peace with Israel, we're making peace with the United States.

Now Gamassi tells me this story. And someone who was on the Israeli delegation tells me this story because it was conveyed to him as well. So what I'm talking about is not hearsay, it's general information from the players themselves. Sadat needed to have cover for making an agreement with Israel. He couldn't just reach out to the Israelis the day after Menachem Begin was elected prime minister on May 17th, 1977 and say, hey, I'm coming to Jerusalem tomorrow, let's sign an agreement. Sadat was still part of the Arab world.

And he didn't want Arab states to believe he was going to do this alone, going to do it by himself, not care about other Palestinian interests or other Arab interests. The one thing Sadat wanted to be sure, he wanted to be sure that no other Arab state, particularly Syria, would be pulling on his coattails and keeping him from moving forward to the Israelis. So when Carter got all bound up in this Geneva conference and bringing people together, and then he wanted to bring in the Soviet Union in October of 77, Sadat put his hand up and said, Mr. President, please don't do this.

Don't stand in the way of me wanting to go and have an agreement or having talks directly with the Israelis. By then, Sadat already had his own vice president who had met with Moshe Dayan privately in Morocco. And Moshe Dayan at the time is Begin's foreign minister. Correct. And Sadat also had checked Begin's readiness to negotiate by asking President Ceausescu of Romania.

And Ceausescu said, you can deal with Begin. Begin's willing to make an agreement. Begin actually goes to see Ceausescu at the end of August and says, is Sadat ready for this? The bottom line is there was a pre-cooking that was going on between Israel and Egypt about negotiations, not the detail of an agreement, but they were willing to test each other. And each one knew that if they were going to test each other and if the negotiations were to unfold, each one of them would have to make compromises that were pretty

hefty compromises for these grizzled ideological leaders of their respective countries. But the interesting part about Begin and Sadat, they're both nationalists, but they both know if there's an agreement, it might be better for their own populations in the years to come. And that was key to Sadat and key to Begin. They looked over the horizon. Both Begin and Sadat succeeded individuals in their respective countries who were considered giants.

Sadat succeeded Nasser, who was the leader of the Arab world in the 50s and 60s. Begin came to office after the man who despised him the most led Israel to independence, David Ben-Gurion. Both Sadat and Beggin, and I get this separately from their advisors, wanted to do something for their respective countries that had not been accomplished by their great giant predecessors. And it's clear that Sadat not only wanted, he wanted an improved relationship with the United States, you mentioned that Kissinger had been cultivating Sadat. Parenthetically, just another excellent book on this front is

is Kissinger's, the last book he published before he passed called Leadership, Six Studies in World Strategy, which I guess you've read. And Kissinger writes, the book basically consists of six mini biographies of different world leaders and one of them is Sadat. And it's an excellent, you really see through that book the development of the relationship between Kissinger and Sadat. Sadat not only wants, I mean it's connected, not only wants a better relationship with the United States, but he wants to break with the Soviet Union.

Correct. So that was an extremely important part of this, which was not the decision of the Geneva Summit was going to be heavily sponsored, if you will, by the US and the Soviet Union. So if Sadat is looking to break with the Soviet Union, part of what's motivating him in this deal is to break with the Soviet Union. The idea that he would have to do some kind of comprehensive deal where all the other actors or a lot of them, including Assad, are captured, owned by the Soviet Union, it would put him in a complicated position.

A B what's interesting. My sense is that both Bagan and Sadat both understood that if there were a comprehensive negotiation, any one of the Arab countries had a veto. So basically if you try to get a deal that all the Arab countries can agree on, at any given moment, any one of them can completely jam it up based on their own parochial issue. Whereas if Begin and Sadat could just do a deal directly together without the rest of the region, it increased the odds of the two of them actually getting a deal done.

That is about 80% of it. There was another 20%. Bring it. When Begin was elected, he was the first member of the Likud party to come to office after 29 years of the Labor Party in power. And Begin had a different attitude about the West Bank, Judea, and Samaria. He thought it was part of Israel's national patrimony. Begin understood after Carter made his remarks about Palestinian homeland. Begin understood that if he cultivated Sadat, he doesn't have to worry about the West Bank and the PLO and a Palestinian homeland.

Okay. So, Sadat travels to Israel, 1977, extraordinary visit, overwhelming majority of Israelis polled in the days leading up to the visit, whether or not they'd be willing to ask whether or not they would support some kind of comprehensive deal that involved Israel withdrawing from the Sinai, overwhelming majority of Israelis said no. Sadat shows up in Israel, he addresses the Knesset, delivers a very powerful speech. Israelis are shocked in a good way that you have the leader of the Arab world, one of the key leaders of the Arab world, one of the key leaders that had led wars against Israel standing in Israel's parliament, recognizing Israel's right to exist and talking about

coexistence, polling in the days after that, overwhelming majority of Israelis support doing a deal with Sadat in Egypt and withdrawing from the Sinai Then there's ups and downs in the negotiations and Carter brings Begin and Sadat To Camp David for what turned out to be 13 days If you were to give Carter his due, what did he personally do during those 13 days to? Consummate what ultimately became the Egypt Israel peace treaty and later in? 1979 Carter was a beneficiary of a very talented group of State Department officials who had worked with Kissinger and

They were terrific dressmen and all during 78 one guy by the name of Roy Atherton Who was assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, is traveling between Cairo and Jerusalem, trying to get a declaration of principles between the two sides. They have a foreign ministers meeting in Leeds in July. They get finished with the foreign ministers meeting and two of the State Department officials go to a hotel outside of London and they draft the first two copies of what comes to be the Camp David Accords. So when Carter goes to Camp David, there's been a lot of staff work, a lot of difficult

negotiations. At Camp David, Carter did a lot of work. Carter did a lot of writing. Carter did a lot of persuasion. Carter did a lot of cajoling. He made the Israelis sometimes terribly angry. And Sadat believed that he could put in Jimmy Carter his full faith, and that ultimately Carter would come away with something where Sadat could potentially get back Sinai. Sadat might not be totally alienated from the Arab world, which he was anyway,

and Begin might, for his own country, walk away with a treaty with the most powerful Arab state. And then you had another six months of negotiations to get to the treaty in March of 79. And as part of the treaty, you had the Egypt-Israel treaty that is held to this day, and as part of that, you had the language that was a little looser, less concrete, referring to the Palestinians' right to govern themselves. Why did Begin agree to that? It seems like a big leap for Begin. Why did Sadat agree to it? It seems to have been a major concession by Sadat.

And what was Carter's view as to what was going to be the legacy of that framework that was articulated? So take all three of them. Right. Why don't you ask three uninteresting questions? First of all, Begin knew that the agreement that he had with Egypt was not going to force Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Carter had the most difficult time in the world of trying to get Begin to even accept

the notion of a land for peace formula as part of the overarching umbrella under which negotiations would take place. So Israel could stay in control of the territories, give the Palestinians autonomy, give themselves rule. They could decide what books to put in the library and what other things they could do in terms of municipal governance. Begin had no intention of withdrawing from the West Bank, no intention of stopping settlements, period. Sadat was perfectly willing to negotiate with the Israelis if the United States would see

to it that Israel would in fact withdraw from Sinai, which had been lost in the 67 war. Because Sadat wanted two things. He wanted to restore Egyptian honor, which was lost in the 67 war. And remember, Sadat had gambled by going to Jerusalem in November of 77, and he couldn't see this trip to Jerusalem ending up with just hot air. It had to have some substance to it. I don't know that Carter was really looking for his own legacy. I think he was more interested in seeing an agreement signed because he had spent so much

time on it. And because he spent so much time on it, I think he needed to have some result. His pollster, Pat Goodell, did interviewing with the American public after Camp David. And in the week after the Camp David Accords, Carter's popularity barely went up one or two percent. Did it go up in Israel? It skyrocketed. Did Egyptians really care? Not as much as Sadat. So this was an agreement between principals and about their own interest in helping their own societies for the next 20 and 30 years. I don't think Carter understood two things. I don't think he understood that when he said Palestinian homeland in 77, that he may have

helped the Labor Party lose the election. Now, there were many reasons why the Labor Party had lost its flavor and its support amongst the Israeli people. The Labor Party had been the dominant political party, the only real political party in power since Israel's founding up until 1977. And then it's a shock to the system when Begin and the Likud party out of nowhere, seemingly out of nowhere, knock labor out of power. And you're saying it may have been because Israelis wanted to elect a tough leader that

wouldn't roll over to a US president that was pushing what they would view as a Palestinian agenda. Most elections really have to do with what's going on domestically rather than foreign affairs. It didn't hurt Beggin that there was a souring relationship between the United States and the president, between the Labor Party. Now, actually, the Labor Party leader, Yatshak Rabin, didn't run in that election. He had to resign because of a bank account which his wife had. That's a lot of the detail which is not relevant here.

I think Carter didn't understand, and this is part of how we started out this conversation. Carter was not aware of the power of the national interest and the ideology of the national interest that dominated Arafat, that dominated Assad, that dominated Hussein, that dominated Sadat. Sadat wanted to help his people get out from under the Soviet Union and have a better economic future and tie that future to the United States. That was first and foremost for Anwar Sadat. And Carter would say later, I trusted Sadat like a brother. And when I made a promise to Sadat, I wasn't going to not deliver on that promise.

He didn't have that kind of close relationship with Begin. OK. So while all this is happening, there are 52 American citizens being held hostage in Iran beginning in 1979 through January 20th 1981 For what amounted to 444 days in total? How is the Iran crisis as a backdrop really? Wow while all this is happening these negotiations are happening What role is that playing and what is your sense that of what Carter took away from the experience of? playing, and what is your sense of what Carter took away from the experience of the takeover of Iran by an Islamist, a radical Islamist regime that was willing to take all these Americans hostage for seemingly no end in sight?

The Carter administration was stunned by the arrival of the Islamic Republic as it became personified by Ayatollah Khomeini. I think there was a lot of focus and concentration on trying to get this Egyptian-Israeli agreement or agreements done. There have been some people who have argued the work that the State Department is that too much emphasis was placed on Egypt-Israel and not enough attention was placed on how the Shah was losing control over his own country and his own people, had mismanaged funds, how there was an urban proletariat who was terribly upset at the Shah.

Some people have tried to put the fall of the Shah at the Carter administration feet. I think there's no question that there was great divergence within the Carter administration on how to handle the Shah. Brzezinski wanted to use force to try and keep him in power. Vance said, absolutely not. When Carter was asked by my students in March of 85, what would you have done different in Iran? In April of 1980, the United States sent in helicopters to try and rescue the Americans

that were held hostage. And Carter's response was, we shouldn't have sent in eight helicopters, we should have sent in 11. Now, actually, the original plan called for 18. Carter was not trained in foreign policy in Plains, Georgia. He wasn't trained on what should the Georgia relationship be with Alabama the weekend that Georgia played Alabama in a football game. That was it, not it.

But if you're like Biden, then you've got 36 years and you go through the Senate and you're there since 1972. And you've got all of this world-class experience of making decisions standing on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It's a lot easier to manage and work with Washington and decision-makers and foreign leaders than it is if you come from Plains, Georgia, you get elected because you're an outsider and then you want to govern Washington as if you're the outsider. That's a statement that Hamilton Jordan made and Hamilton was Carter's...

Top political advisor. Top political advisor. And Jordan said in 1985, 1986, the biggest mistake we did, we thought how we got elected was how we could govern and Boy, were we wrong? Okay, so I now want to fast-forward Carter loses his reelection campaign gets blown out by Reagan It's an understatement I know and then Carter returns to Georgia ultimately starts the Carter Center at Emory University You work very closely

with him on a range of issues, specifically the Middle East. You wind up traveling with Carter to the Middle East in 1983, in 1987, 1990. President Carter basically casts himself as a, I mean there'd be never anything like this where a post president plays this kind of role or at least tries to play this kind of role where he's directly inserting himself in foreign policy, often as you know not in coordination with the sitting administration, whether it was Republican or Democrat, often to the frustration of his successors. And one of the many areas that he inserts himself in is the Middle East, Israel, trying to

build on his quote-unquote Middle East peace legacy. The two of you write a book together called The Blood of Abraham in 1984 about the Middle East. That book was not controversial, I don't think. And then Carter, unbeknownst to you, writes a second book in 2006 called Palestine Peace, Not Apartheid. And that was the first time, it's not the first time the apartheid charge had been directed at Israel, but it's the first time that someone of Carter's stature, a national leader, a former US president, a former US president that had crafted this role for himself as a senior statesman, that he was accusing Israel of apartheid.

Two questions. The first is why the sudden turn, or maybe it wasn't a sudden turn. Maybe it was a natural evolution. In some respects, he was very much ahead of his time, you could argue. And then I want to get to your, the implications for your relationship with him, because I know you two were very close. But first, based on your understanding, what was going on there? The Carter Center evolved out of a handshake between Carter and the president of Emory University, Jim Laney.

Carter told a group of about six or seven of us professors who were writing an outline of what the Carter Center would look like. He said, I don't want to have a place where we're going to sit and publish documents and articles and have scholarly meetings. I want it to be action-oriented. I want us to do things. As it turned out, one of the first things they wanted to do action-oriented. I wanted to do things. And as it turned out, one of the first things they wanted to do was five years after Kim David, which was a big meeting in 1983 where Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were the co-chairs.

But the Carter Center became Carter's second presidency. It became the platform for him to speak out on a whole series of issues, not just the Middle East. He was clobbered, as you correctly say, by Reagan. And he was relentless in his criticism of Reagan during the first two and three and four years of Reagan's first term in office. I mean, he was relentless. And Carter went on to criticize many of his successors. He went on to criticize the first George Bush on the

whole issue of intervening in Iraq. Well he didn't just criticize him, he actually communicated directly with heads of state in the Arab world telling them not to cooperate with President Bush and the US government. Kind of an extraordinary step. Brent Scowcroft, who was National Security Advisor to Bush at the time, believed that Carter was getting pretty close to... Violating the Logan Act. Right, right. That you can't conduct your own US foreign policy as a private citizen.

Carter was not circumspect about his opinion. And the less circumspect he became, if he was at all at the beginning, he realized former presidents aren't held accountable and no one can hold them accountable. There's no forum. You can't get impeached for being a former president. They can't throw Ian Joyer for being a former president. And he didn't just write one more book on the Middle East. He wrote six or seven more on the Middle East.

He wrote 30 books total, of which six or seven of them focused on just the Middle East. Carter was captivated. He was slain, he was addicted to trying to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli and the Arab-Israeli conflict because he thought he could, he thought he should, and he thought he was not given the chance to do so because he lost to Ronald Reagan. I can't tell you how many times he said to me, at least half a dozen, throughout the 1980s, if they'd only give me a chance, I can do this. I times he said to me, at least half a dozen, throughout the 1980s, if they'd only give me a chance, I can do this.

I said, what do you mean? He said, if they only give me a chance to get back into mediation, I can make a difference. I said, Mr. President, Arafat is not Sadat and the West Bank is not Sinai. And he'd go, oh, come on, this can be done. He even wrote a book titled, There Can Be Peace in the Middle East. So when he comes out with Palestine, Peace, Not Apartheid, he had evolved into this frustration that his successors had not done what he had done by intervening with the White House as being that place of mediation that could succeed.

Carter kept on believing, rightfully so, that his mediation made a difference, but successors didn't have a bag in Sadat. Carter did. I've always tried to emphasize, Carter could play an incredibly important role in getting two people together, to handcuffing them together for 13 days,

but if they didn't want to reach an agreement, they would not have reached an agreement. Sam Lewis, who I referred to earlier, made a very important statement in 2011. He said, if the mediators want an agreement, that's fine, but the mediators can't want an agreement more than the respective sides. Unless the respective sides wish an agreement, it will never happen no matter how much pressure or urging or guarantees that the mediator provides. And Sam was absolutely right. During Camp David, during the years, you know, 77, 78, 79, when all these negotiations indirectly

or directly were taking place between Egypt and 78, 79, when all these negotiations indirectly or directly were taking place between Egypt and Israel. And even when President Carter was trying to engage in the Middle East post his presidency, there was never a Palestinian leader. To your point that our fault was not Sadat, there was no Palestinian leader that seemed committed to recognition of Israel that could deliver a deal and that even was committed to UN Resolution 242 that called for some kind of peace for recognition and security deal. It wasn't just that he couldn't want it more than the actual leaders.

There was no one in the Palestinian world in the leadership that was serious about peace with Israel. Let me refine it. We did get to 1993 Oslo Accords and and four days before it was signed on September 13, Israel recognized the PLO and the PLO recognized Israel. Now Arafat did it in order to stay in control of the PLO. Rabin said he did it because he wanted to support the secular Palestinian Arab National Movement over the growing Islamic Palestinian Arab National Movement, which was personified by the growing influence of Hamas. In other words, Rabin's idea was

bolster secular Palestinian Arab nationalism. We have a better chance of negotiating and living with Palestinian Arab secular nationalism than we will ever have in trying to negotiate with Palestinian nationalism that's driven by Islamic ideology. And October 7th, 2023 proved Rabin correct.

In the book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, and I'll quote from the book, Carter wrote, it is imperative, I'm quoting here, it is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the roadmap for peace are accepted by Israel. Now that sentence and I know you've pointed to it yourself, I mean there's a lot of that in this book, where he's legitimizing the suicide bombings, Carter. He's legitimizing the terrorism. He's saying, he's effectively saying it's terrible these things are happening, but the Palestinians can use it as leverage to get Israel to commit to a process and if

Israel does, Hamas will stop engaging in what was a massive campaign of terrorism. That was the sentence that caused me to resign from the Carter Center. And when I pointed it out to several members of the Carter Center board, 12 members of the board followed within 10 days and they resigned as well. Carter was essentially saying it's okay to kill Israelis because they're not behaving the way I think they should behave. As it turned out when the book was republished again at the end of 2007, that sentence was taken out of the next edition. It was never called the second edition of the book. And I made a big deal about it because I had a view of the Arab-Israeli conflict of Palestinians

and Israelis really can't live together, they got to find a way to live apart. That was my view since I studied the Palestine mandate and the British suggested partition of Palestine in 1937. I knew that, or I had learned that. But Carter went beyond that. Carter went to the point of saying, Israelis have to be punished because they're not following international rules that have been established on what their attitudes and behavior should be toward the Palestinians. That's different than negotiating an agreement based on a UN resolution between two presidents, between a president and a prime minister at the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli

Treaty. That proverbially broke my camelback. So can I guess I just want to wrap, Carter had met with Hamas leaders repeatedly? From 2003 onwards. Right. And he was telling Israel and the US governments that they have to deal with Hamas, they have to recognize Hamas as the legitimate political actors representing the Palestinian people.

I'm basically quoting from what he had said. There's no national leader, I do not think. There's no senior statesman who had held a position comparable to what President Carter did or remotely close that had done more to elevate Hamas or legitimize them than he did. I guess, you know, I played some of the clips from the funeral at the beginning of this conversation, including our mutual friend Stu Eisenstats, who, you know,

made the case that Carter was a great friend of the Jews. Look, he accomplished something extraordinary with Camp David, right? That peace treaty has survived two Israel-Lebanon wars. It has survived two intifadas. It has survived the Muslim Brotherhood being in power in Egypt following Mubarak for a short but very dangerous period of time, it survived October 7th, it survived this last year and a half, it's an extraordinary accomplishment and yet Israel experienced, suffered, was the victim of a complete and utter attempt at a genocidal massacre on October 7th that Israel is still reeling from and that Jews around the world are still reeling from and living

with. I listened to some of the eulogies today and I'm thinking everyone seems a little defensive making the case that Carter was quote unquote good for the Jews and good for the Jewish people. I do not feel that way. You've I think lived in both of those worlds. Sympathetic to Carter and obviously post-2006 in his book about quote-unquote Israeli apartheid, quite critical. Where do you land today? I think you're giving me too much credit. I wasn't sympathetic to him

before 2006. I looked at some memorandum which I wrote for him as early as 1983 and 84 and I said, Mr. President, if you can't keep on beating Israel over the head, no one's ever going to want you back as a mediator. You can't be one-sided in this if you want back in. I must have written eight or nine of those memos over 15 or 20 years. You don't know about it because there were private conversations or private discussions or private exchanges. If Carter really was opposed to the Jewish state, then what he did at Camp David completely was contradictory to that.

Carter solidified the state of Israel probably as important or maybe just a little bit less important than Truman's recognition of Israel in 1948. Because Carter essentially said, there's an Arab country that's going to recognize you. And the Israelis always said, recognition, recognition, accept us, accept us as a state. And we don't want to be just accepted by the United States and the European Union countries and by the UN, we want to be accepted by our neighbors. And Sadat put up his hand.

And then Jordan did. And then the UAE did. And then Bahrain did. And the Abraham Accords. And then Sudan and Morocco. In other words, Carter did a lot to unleash a process where Arab states would recognize Israel because it was in their national interest to do so. What did we learn from October 7th?

We learned that Israel can be recognized diplomatically, but it's not going to be accepted as a Jewish state in the Middle East. Recognition is one thing. Being accepted as an equal is quite different. And that's why or how the motivation for the anti-Semitism that evolves after October 7th emerges. I think Carter would have preferred if he could have been asked to come back in and be a mediator, but I think he would have run into a stonewall because he realized that the

Middle East was not yet ready, the Arab world was not ready, and many Muslim states were not ready to still put their arms around a Jewish state 76 years after it was created. Anyone who reads the Arabic newspapers, as I try and do once a week, knows that Israel is referred to as the occupying state. And they're not talking about the West Bank. They're talking about all the land west of the Jordan River.

Now that's not something you're going to read about in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or CNN or MSNBC or even on Fox News, because they're not reading Arabic sources. And that's one of the great problems we have. It's the same problem that Jimmy Carter had. We don't understand the political cultures of the Middle East. We don't understand what people are saying to themselves. We listen to one another. We read each other's editorials,

and we say, boy, that smells good, that tastes good. I can live with that. But maybe some problems can't be resolved, at least not by mediation, and at least not by give and take. Maybe it's going to take a De Gaulle to go to Algeria, or it's going to take a Nixon to go to China. You need leaders who are willing to look over the horizon like Begin and Sadat did. And we don't have those leaders today. So all I'm saying is advocates of a two-state solution, it's a great idea, but you can't make it happen

unless they wanna make it happen. Sam Lewis, you were right. You were absolutely right. Ken, we will leave it there. Thank you. Great little history of a very dense topic. We covered a lot of territory, and I appreciate your history lesson and your insights, and look forward to having you back on again. I hope insights is spelled with an S and not a C. All right, we'll leave it there.

Thank you, and thank your team for putting this together. That's our show for today. You can head to our website, ARKmedia.org. That's ARK, ARKmedia.org to sign up for updates, get in touch with us and access transcripts, all of which have been hyperlinked to resources that we hope will enrich your understanding of the topics covered in the episodes on this podcast. Call Me Back is produced and edited by Alain Benatar. Additional editing by Martin Huérgaux.

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