Carter Pipes Up
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
It has become the fashion to suggest that the root cause of the war of suicide bombings and other terror being waged against Israel was the “peace process” begun at Oslo, Norway. And there is little doubt — always clear to some, clear only in hindsight to others — that Oslo created extraordinary incentives for the current catastrophe.
But there are those of us who reckon the errors that set the stage for the current crisis go back even further than Oslo, all the way back to the Carter administration and the original negotiations at Camp David. This is brought to mind by the fact that President Carter has just fetched up on the op-ed page of the New York Times with an extraordinarily mendacious piece calling for America to use conditionality in its foreign and military aid to force the Jewish State to make concessions.
The 39th president has particularly nasty references to Prime Minister Sharon, asserting that he has rejected “all peace agreements that included Israeli withdrawal from Arab lands…” One has to pinch oneself to remember that Mr. Carter’s own Camp David Accords could be implemented only by the withdrawal — forced withdrawal, at that — of Jewish settlers from the Sinai.
And who was the one Israeli leader with the credibility to force the Jewish retreat from Yamit, the spot where that was put to the test? It was, of course, Mr. Sharon. It might even be argued that Mr. Sharon paid a greater price for peace at Yamit than any member of the Carter administration ever risked.
The difference with today, of course, is that Prime Minister Begin and Mr. Sharon calculated that they were dealing with a leader, in President Al-Sadat of Egypt, who actually wanted peace. Prime Minister Sharon does not have grounds for that calculation when he considers Yasser Arafat or any other Palestinian Arab figure. So all one really can make of Mr. Carter’s latest intervention is that it gives proof to the long-held suspicion as to just where his heart was in the Middle East, which may be why the agreement he forced at Camp David has produced such a cold peace in the years that followed.
