A tribute to Jimmy Carter, the diplomatic peacemaker between Israel and Egypt: Lessons from his legacy

President James Earl Carter Jr, known, to many, simply as Jimmy Carter, the 39th President of the USA finally breathed his last on the 29th December 2024 at the age of 100 years. 

Carter died more than 43 years after leaving the White House, becoming, by far, the longest-surviving former president of the United States of America. 

The late President’s casket will be flown back to Atlanta, Georgia, where there will be a private funeral service in his home town before a private interment at his residence next to his late wife Rosalynn’s grave on Thursday evening as per his wish. 

Although Jimmy Carter was a one-term president, from Jan 20th 1977 to 1981, when he handed over the Presidency to the Republican President Ronald Reagan, his presidency is perhaps one of the least written about, yet, perhaps, the most diplomatically impactful in the recent Middle East geopolitics.

There is a parlance that in the fullness of time, history is always fair. And history will now be fair to President Carter because his many decades of undertaking peace negotiations, relentless campaigns for human rights and advocating for social and economic welfare and equity are now fully recognised after his death.

Despite his ground-breaking, foreign policy achievement in the Middle East, in moderating the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt during his one-term in office, not much consideration and credit was going his way. He was awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, over two decades after leaving the White House, in recognition of his dedication and untiring efforts for peaceful solutions to end international conflicts, promoting democracy and humanitarian efforts.

President Carter’s personal initiative and commitment to drive the peace process between Israel and Egypt, during one of the most difficult times at the peak of the Cold War, culminating in the famous Camp David Accords will endear him in the annals of history as a veritable diplomatic statesman.

The consequential accords were signed on September 17, 1978 by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, at a ceremony at the famous Camp David presidential country retreat, in Maryland, USA. 

The agreements entailed the cessation of hostilities between Israel and Egypt, the full recognition of the State of Israel by Egypt, in exchange for the return, and the demilitarisation of the Sinai Peninsula which had been earlier captured and occupied by Israel following the Six -Day-war of 1967 between Israel-Egypt, the free passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal, and a process for the Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza. The accords also had frameworks for peace between Israel and its other neighbours in the region.

Both President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin were consequently jointly recognized, awarded and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. President Sadat later paid the ultimate price at the hands of the anti-Israel extremists for his statesmanship and unbridled decision to sign the peace treaty with Israel. 

Rarely in modern history do we find statesmen who lead in delicate and consequential diplomatic overtures to resolve complex international conflicts of the magnitude of the Arab -Israeli conflict. No wonder some analysts already opine that Carter will most likely be remembered as the ‘’father of the Israeli- Arab normalisation.’’

The accords were outrightly and instantly opposed by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO), and other Arab states, for not resolving the thorny issue of the Palestinian Question, and sustainable peace in the wider Middle East region. However, it is fair to say that the signing of the Camp David Accords has stood the test of time and remains as a beacon of hope for peace and stability in the Middle East and North Africa.

Of course, there were other peace initiatives in the region before the accords, and there have been many more after. 

But none has been as significant and with far-reaching and sustainable consequences as the peace treaty which President Carter brokered between Israel and Egypt.

The Camp David Accords have also arguably, survived the 2000 regional efforts at peace by President Clinton and the recent Abrahamic Accords spearheaded by President Trump during his first term in office. 

And, it is also noteworthy that the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt is so far surviving the currently raging Israeli onslaught on Hamas and Hezbollah, following the latter’s unprecedented horrific terror attacks on Israel on October 7th 2023. It is unfathomable what the scenario would have looked like if Egypt did not have a peace agreement with Israel in the face of the ongoing war in Gaza.

Since history repeats itself once, and second as a farce, today there is another historic chance for the US and the Middle East to usher in a new era of peaceful co-existence. 

There is a new regime in Damascus which has given clear signals, indicating that it does not want any more conflicts and would seek and pursue peace; ‘that it is exhausted by war and that it is not a threat to its neighbours, (read Israel), or to the West’.  

At the same time, the Iranian Axis of Resistance which was a network of proxy militant groups, in Iran, Iraq, Syria itself and Yemen, has been thoroughly obliterated and annihilated, perhaps, beyond recovery.

In light of the foregoing, the new Trump administration which takes over the Oval Office on January 20, 2025, may need to craft a clearer long-term policy blueprint which will incorporate these new geopolitical realities which occurred while Trump ‘was away’, and seize the unique historical moment.

The in-coming new administration needs to go beyond merely easing calculated sanctions on Syria and make bold steps to bring both the battle-fatigued Israel, and the fledgling administration in Syria under the former ISIS commander turned liberator, Ahmed Al Sharra, to the negotiating table and agree on a path for mutual peace and security.

Both Israel and the new leadership in Damascus need to be persuaded to sign a peace deal with each other. Syria should be made to see the long-term merits and mutual gains of recognising the existence of the State of Israel and agree on their common border. 

In exchange, Israel would to cease the hostilities and rampant bombardments of strategic installations and key security infrastructure in Syria, return the recently ‘occupied territory’ beyond the UN- buffer zone, and demilitarise the Golan Heights. 

All these efforts should then culminate in a framework for resolving the Palestinian Question and setting a clear path for the two-state solution for the Palestinian people. 

That would be a befitting way of honouring the consequential memory of President Jimmy Carter.

Mr Ogego is a former Kenyan Ambassador to the United States and is currently a tutorial fellow and PhD Research candidate in the Department of Diplomacy and International Studies (IDDIS) at the University of Nairobi.