On December 29, former President Jimmy Carter passed away at the age of 100. As the 39th president of the United States and as a private citizen, Carter was an advocate for peace between nations, democracy and various humanitarian and environmental causes. But in the Middle East, he is going to be remembered as the father of Arab-Israeli normalisation.
Sworn in as president in 1977, Carter was given the opportunity by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to be the architect of the first normalisation deal between an Arab country and the Zionist state. He helped Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin conclude the 1978 Camp David Accords and negotiate the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty that formally ended the conflict between the two countries.
As developments in the past four decades have shown, neither the accords nor the treaty led to peace and justice in the Middle East. Israel continues its occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and has launched a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip; the Palestinians still do not have an independent state with Jerusalem as its capital; and an overwhelming majority of the Arab public refuses to recognise Israel or agree to normalising relations with it.
Looking back at the accords Carter brokered, it is clear that they were the beginning of the slow and gradual, although not publicly acknowledged, abandonment of the Palestinian cause by Arab officialdom, and a US campaign to bury Palestinian national aspirations.
The Camp David Accords were first and foremost a roadmap towards a full Egyptian-Israeli peace, full recognition of Israel by Egypt, and an end to Egypt’s participation in the Arab economic boycott of Israel. To be sure, the accords were a mere framework for negotiations between the two countries that would lead a few months later to the signing of a peace treaty.
But they also included provisions related to the Palestinian people, whose wording was indicative of the ultimate purpose of the accords. The document spoke of a plan to provide “autonomy” to the “inhabitants” of the occupied territory, as if the Palestinians were aliens squatting in the West Bank and Gaza.
At the time, the US had not yet recognised the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Thus, the accords called for electing a “self-governing authority” for the occupied territory. But that autonomy and the elected authority were to be supervised by Israel, Egypt, and Jordan, in obvious violation of the Palestinians’ right to constitute an independent, national government.
Throughout the 1980s, and because of US-supported Israeli objections, the Palestinians were absent and prevented from playing a role in devising peace plans for the Arab-Israeli and Palestine-Israel conflict. But the eruption of the first Intifada in December of 1987 and Jordan’s 1988 relinquishing of its claim to the West Bank made it clear that the Palestinians could no longer be ignored in peace negotiations.
Still, in 1991, the Palestinians participating in the Madrid Conference were only present as part of a Jordanian delegation, once again denying their nationhood.
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