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jimmy carter
100-Year-Old Jimmy Carter Shows Us What Courage Looks Like on Israel-Palestine
As we celebrate and reflect on Carter’s life and legacy, let us amplify his call for the U.S. to be a genuine force for peace and justice around the world.
Oct 08, 2024
Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States who turned 100 this month, has built a legacy of courage and moral clarity over his many decades in public service, fighting tirelessly for peace and human dignity at home and around the world.
Now, as he nears the twilight of his life, we must take the time to reflect on one of his most courageous stances: his unwavering commitment to Palestinian dignity and self-determination.
In 1996, President Carter stood with us, the Palestinian people, as we voted for our leaders for the very first time. Though the Oslo peace process had failed to deliver the independent Palestinian state we had hoped for, Carter believed that the act of casting our ballots was still vital – that it was a chance to build a future rooted in peace and justice.
His presence in Palestine during that first election underscored our hopes for a brighter tomorrow, despite the heavy shadows of occupation and displacement.
What makes Jimmy Carter’s stance on Palestine unique is not only his moral courage, but the fact that he was once the most powerful man in the world.
In 2003, as the separation wall began to snake across the West Bank, I met President Carter once again at The Carter Center’s first-ever Human Rights Defenders Forum in Atlanta, Georgia.
There, I told him about the stark realities faced by Palestinians in the West Bank city of Qalqilia – 40,000 people encircled by concrete, with only one gate allowing them access to farms, medical care and the outside world. A single gate that opened and closed at the whim of Israeli soldiers, sometimes remaining shut for days at a time. As I updated him on the situation in Palestine, I called it what it is: apartheid, the separation of two peoples based on ethnicity, with one dominating the other through systemic injustice. Carter listened, intently and without judgement.
Just two years later, in 2005, he had the opportunity to see the reality for himself when he returned to Palestine to observe the presidential elections, in which I was the leading independent candidate against Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas.
During this time, President Carter witnessed firsthand how Israel, rather than building bridges to secure peace, was constructing walls – walls that cut deep into Palestinian land, walls that annex settlements and water resources, walls that isolate Palestinians into enclaves. He also witnessed how, after a meeting we had in Jerusalem, the Israeli security service arrested me for no reason other than preventing me from talking to Palestinian voters there. It was during this visit, I believe, that it became clear to him that Israel was not preparing for peace, but instead consolidating control in ways that would make a two-state solution impossible.
In 2006, Carter published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, a book that shook the American political landscape. In it, he laid out a simple truth: without Palestinian freedom and dignity, there could be no peace. He made the case not as an enemy of Israel, but as someone deeply invested in its survival. Yet, for daring to speak this truth, Carter was vilified. He was accused of being anti-Semitic and ostracized by many in the US and even his Democratic Party. But Carter never wavered. He continued to speak the truth about the realities in Palestine – not out of malice for Israel, but from a deep belief in justice.
He understood that the only way Israel could truly thrive was through a just peace with the Palestinians. He recognized that the Palestinian people, who have lived under brutal occupation since 1967 and experienced repeated displacement since 1948, were entitled to the same rights and dignity as anyone else. He recognized in later writings that it was my 2003 account of the situation in Qalqilia that made him understand the reality of apartheid in Palestine.
What makes Jimmy Carter’s stance on Palestine unique is not only his moral courage, but the fact that he was once the most powerful man in the world. As U.S. president, he tried to open the road to lasting peace. He could not secure Palestinian self-determination during his one-term presidency between 1977 and 1981, yet he refused to stop trying. In the decades since leaving office, he has turned every stone, searched for every possibility to bring about a just peace for Palestinians and all the people of the Middle East.
As we celebrate and reflect on Carter’s life and legacy, let us amplify his call for the U.S. to be a genuine force for peace and justice around the world.
Now, as he enters his 100th year and tributes pour in to honor his many humanitarian achievements, we must not forget that he was one of the most important truth-tellers of our time. Carter was willing to see the brutality inflicted on the Palestinian people and refused to remain silent about it. That is a rare kind of courage, especially for a former U.S. president, that should be recognized and remembered.
The best way we can honor Jimmy Carter, his bravery and unwavering moral clarity is to carry forward his commitment to equal human rights for all people.
The Palestinian struggle for self-determination is not just a political issue – it is a moral one. As Carter always emphasized, the U.S. has a special responsibility. Without American political and military support, Israel would not have been able to continue its ruthless occupation and apartheid against Palestinians or to commit the genocide in Gaza.
As we celebrate and reflect on Carter’s life and legacy, let us amplify his call for the U.S. to be a genuine force for peace and justice around the world. Let us recognize, as Carter wanted, that peace in our Holy Land will only come when the rights and dignity of Palestinians are acknowledged and respected. Only then will we truly be able to honor his legacy and the values he stood for so bravely.
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Tim Walz Is a First! A Union Member and Not a Lawyer
Before Walz was chosen the last thirteen people to grace the Democratic ticket were lawyers. And a union member to boot? Never.
Aug 08, 2024
In October of 1874, Arthur Latham Perry, a Williams College professor and one of the most prominent economists of his day journeyed west of the Missouri River for the first time in his life. The occasion of his trip was an invitation to address the Nebraska State Fair and its audience of farmers. Perry began his speech by noting that for every 150 farmers in America, there was one lawyer. He went on to say “I can count you one hundred of these lawyers, who have exerted more practical influence in the states and in the nation” than all of America’s farmers combined. “There is no objection to raise to lawyers; they are a useful class of men,” Perry continued, “but there is decided objection to allowing a mere handful of them, representing a mere handful of clients, to shape and mold the policy of” an entire nation.
I happened to be reading Perry’s speech as part of research for a book the day before Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate. For a mainstream media obsessed with firsts it was surprising that lost in the news of the choice and the horse-race handicapping that inevitably followed was the number of impressive firsts Walz represents. Tim Walz, unlike Vice-President Harris, President Biden, Hillary Clinton, Tim Kaine, Barack Obama, John Kerry, John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Michael Dukakis, Lloyd Bentsen, Walter Mondale, and Geraldine Ferraro is in fact, not a lawyer. Not since Jimmy Carter led the ticket in 1980 have Democrats not nominated a lawyer for national office.
Before Walz was chosen the last thirteen people to grace the Democratic ticket were lawyers. High statistical analysis is all the rage in American political entertainment these days, so let’s play with some numbers. Lawyers make up roughly .4% of the American population. Given those odds if you were to draw from a hat lawyers and non-lawyers the chances of coming up with lawyers thirteen times in a row would be one time every 670,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts. Or to put it in more colloquial terms, for every time you expect that outcome to occur, you might also expect to win the Powerball jackpot at least three times and probably four.
If you were to draw from a hat lawyers and non-lawyers the chances of coming up with lawyers thirteen times in a row would be one time every 670,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 attempts.
Walz’s not being a lawyer—from here on we will refer to this as his alawyerness—is not unrelated from another “first” and statistical anomaly in American politics that Walz represents. He is a union member, the first as far as I can tell, to ever grace a Democratic Party ticket. Union membership has of course risen and fallen dramatically in the last hundred years, with a high of nearly 36% of American workers in 1953 falling to a record low of only 10% last year. I’ll leave the truly sophisticated statistical analysis to a soothsaying Nate (to be named later). Nevertheless, we probably could have expected a union member to have joined the Democratic ticket at least five or six times since 1924. Indeed, given that the national party has been much more closely associated with the interests of organized labor during the last century, one could extrapolate an even higher likelihood.
Statistical absurdities aside, there’s a lot contained in these two firsts about Walz and the history of the national Democratic Party ticket. There are stories to be told about why the political party that is at least a bit more devoted to the interests of working Americans would repeatedly put lawyers at the top of its ticket when Americans trust people like nurses and teachers at least three times as much. Stories to be told about why law school is a pathway to political prominence when union shop stewardship or agricultural cooperative leadership are not. Stories about the kinds of people who set their sights on politics from a young age versus those who come to politics out of their workplaces and communities. Stories about the different interests those different kinds of people tend to represent. Stories about the milieus elite private university graduates tend to inhabit and those that public school and state college graduates tend to inhabit. Stories about what kinds of policies the Democratic Party might pursue if its most prominent leaders were nurses, bus drivers, social workers, pipefitters, firefighters, sanitation workers, farmers, teachers, coaches, and union members. And there are lots of stories to be told about the influence of money versus real democratic constituencies in Democratic Party politics.
We probably could have expected a union member to have joined the Democratic ticket at least five or six times since 1924.
Now, as Perry told those Nebraska farmers many decades ago, nothing against lawyers. But Walz’s alawyerness and his union membership, his career as a teacher, coach, and national guardsman, suggest a path forward for everyday Democrats who hope to build a real majority to enact public goods like universal childcare, family leave, health care, and high-quality, well-funded education while also protecting reproductive rights, voting rights, and guaranteeing every working American a wage on which they and their families can live on with a modicum of security.
That path has nothing to do with Walz’s “folksy” charm or any other of the countless adjectives that national commentators use to describe him. Adjectives that give away just how exotic his alawyerness and union membership are to those who assume that law school and elite universities provide a birthright to political leadership in the 21st Century Democratic Party. Walz’s newfound prominence and the statistical anomaly that his appearance on the Democratic Party ticket represents should serve as a reminder.
The reminder should be that what the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone used to call the democratic wing of the Democratic Party is made up not of lawyers, hedge fund managers, tech gurus, and media elites, but rather of people who come to politics from their everyday experiences and concerns in their workplaces and communities and who—statistically speaking of course-- can meaningfully represent the interest of their fellow workers and neighbors.
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Biden’s 30X30 Conservation Plan Falls Far Short of What Is Needed
To the delight of oil drillers, miners, trophy hunters, ranchers, farmers, loggers, and factory trawlers, the Biden plan calls for not initiating any conservation action at the federal level.
Jan 30, 2024
Protecting America’s marine and terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity to give them the best chance to survive the climate catastrophe this century is a critical national challenge. In Executive Order 14008 “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad,” issued during his first month in office, President Joe Biden committed to address this national imperative by pledging to conserve 30% of U.S. lands and waters by the year 2030—known as the “30x30” initiative.
But now, after three years, the administration’s much-trumpeted plan has clearly fallen far short of what is needed.
This failure was designed from the start. In the program’s 2021 rollout: “Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful,” the administration conceded that it does not intend to initiate protections of more federal lands or waters itself, but instead would simply support “locally led, voluntary” efforts to “conserve” working lands and waters. Ironically, the decision to rely on “locally led” conservation efforts was made in a closed-door, top-down process in D.C., with no public input.
Our terrestrial and ocean ecosystems are in turmoil from decades of overuse, pollution, and climate change, and we need to do everything possible to reduce all anthropogenic impacts and stressors.
In its “America the Beautiful 2023 Annual Report,” the White House lists a number of worthy conservation initiatives, but most focus on public recreation, urban parks, jobs, economic development, and supporting “fishers, ranchers, farmers, and forest owners.” These are all helpful, but collectively fall far short of what is urgently necessary to sustain America’s declining ecosystems in the face of climate change and decades of overexploitation. Nowhere does the administration report any quantitative progress toward the stated “30x30” goal, as there has actually been so little.
Worrying signs in the framing of America the Beautiful included statements such as the following:
Rather than simply measuring conservation progress by national parks, wilderness lands, and marine protected areas in the care of the government, the president’s vision recognizes and celebrates the voluntary conservation efforts of farmers, ranchers, and forest owners… [and] contributions and stewardship traditions of America’s hunters, anglers, and fishing communities….
and
...the president’s challenge specifically emphasizes the notion of “conservation” of the nation’s natural resources (rather than the related but different concept of “protection” or “preservation”) recognizing that many uses of our lands and waters, including of working lands, can be consistent with the long-term health and sustainability of natural systems.
To the delight of oil drillers, miners, trophy hunters, ranchers, farmers, loggers, and factory trawlers, the Biden plan calls for not initiating any conservation action at the federal level, instead ceding federal responsibility on this to local, parochial politics.
This “locally led” approach is an old trope used by anti-federal interests to feign concern for the environment while continuing to profit from environmental destruction. And the fabricated distinction between “conservation” and “protection or preservation” has been an industry rhetorical device for decades, dating back to the 1980s “Wise Use” movement. In fact, these terms are synonymous and interchangeable. This semantic distinction is an attempt to justify the environmentally unjustifiable—business as usual. Clearly, this is not a plan designed to protect ecological habitat and biodiversity in the face of decades of overexploitation and the growing climate catastrophe.
The America the Beautiful effort makes no mention of the many candidate species the administration continues to ignore for listing under the Endangered Species Act, presents no assessment of critical habitat conservation needs, and essentially ignores the results and recommendations of billions of dollars of ecological science.
Indeed, local conservation efforts are an essential part of the overall puzzle, but alone will not protect the large ecosystems necessary for habitat and biodiversity conservation. For that we need bold leadership at the federal level to establish new, large-scale, strongly protected national parks, wildlife refuges, and national monuments, onshore and offshore.
Put simply, America the Beautiful is a necessary—but not sufficient—response to the catastrophic decline in America’s natural treasures, ecological habitat, and biodiversity. It is a populist palliative, tidying up the deck of the sinking Titanic.
While local communities adjacent to federal lands and waters certainly deserve a voice—even a priority voice—in how these federal resources are managed, they cannot be afforded an exclusive voice or veto authority. Yet that is precisely what the Biden approach does. The federal government has a constitutional mandate to manage federal lands and waters in the national interest, on behalf of all 340 million Americans.
Local interests do not always align with national interests. When they do, great. But when they don’t, the federal government must secure the national interest, even if it upsets local politicians and commercial interests.
For instance, had former President Jimmy Carter taken a “voluntary, locally led” approach on federal lands in Alaska with the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA)—ultimately protecting 157 million acres of some of the most spectacular national parks, preserves, refuges, wilderness areas, and monuments in the world, the largest expansion of protected lands in U.S. history—that historic conservation achievement would never have happened due to overwhelming local opposition in Alaska. In fact, many of America’s national parks were established over the objections of local communities.
If the intent of the 30x30 initiative is to give our struggling terrestrial and marine ecosystems the best chance possible to make it to the far side of the climate chaos this century, the current approach clearly fails. As has been clear for decades, there are things that only the federal government can, and must, do.
The nation deserves more. Our terrestrial and ocean ecosystems are in turmoil from decades of overuse, pollution, and climate change, and we need to do everything possible to reduce all anthropogenic impacts and stressors. That can only be done through bold federal leadership. During the previous administration, we lost four years of federal momentum on this, and if the previous president were to be reelected this November, we will lose another four critical years. This may be our last best chance to get this right.
We now need President Biden to summon his inner Jimmy Carter, identify all of our nation’s most critical and threatened onshore and offshore ecosystems, and use his executive authority under the Antiquities Act to designate strongly protected, large-scale national monuments to fully protect these natural treasures from further exploitation and damage.
Our precious and troubled ecosystems deserve no less.
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