I debated Jimmy Carter, and he changed my mind about peace (Haaretz)

It took me years to understand that this older man – who practiced another faith and led in a different time – didn't represent a bygone era, but a world I could not yet see.

This essay was published today in Haaretz:

On an overcast December afternoon, in a small, crowded classroom in suburban Atlanta, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter changed my mind.

I was an undergraduate in history at Emory University, deeply skeptical about the prospects for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. My conversation with Carter – brief, but lasting – opened me to the possibility that I was wrong; that reconciliation, both in geopolitics and in our own lives, was achievable if we stepped toward it at the very moment it seemed impossible.

The setting was a small seminar exploring the civil rights battles of the modern American presidency, from the racial discrimination of Roosevelt-era New Deal programs to the vigilante killings of young Black men that roiled the nation during the Obama years. At the semester’s end, the instructor invited Carter, then in his late 80s, for a special session on his White House tenure.

Carter, who died on December 29 at 100 and will be buried in Plains, Georgia January 9, joined the Emory faculty after losing the 1980 election. When I was a student, in the early 2010s, he would still show up on campus occasionally, including visiting my classroom that afternoon.

Carter arrived without fanfare, accompanied only by one aide and a Secret Service agent who stood guard in the hallway. He introduced himself to each student in turn, offering brief remarks about our respective hometowns. (“Oh, my wife and I lived in New Canaan when I was in the Navy.”) When we took our seats, folding ourselves into the room’s compact chair desks, the 39th president did the same.

Carter spoke for a while on the topic of the session, recalling in impressive detail the domestic political battles of his presidency. I found him to be charming and honest, funny and occasionally self-critical. But when it was time for questions, his answers felt canned.

I raised my hand and asked about an issue on which the former president still sometimes made news: preconditions for peace negotiations in the Middle East. Carter was against delaying Israeli-Palestinian talks until specific demands were met, a position which earned him criticism that sometimes boiled over into scorn in the American Jewish community in which I had grown up.

I imagined the subject might draw Carter into a more spirited discussion. It did: Suddenly I found myself, a college sophomore, engrossed in a policy debate with a former U.S. president. Though the details of the exchange seem less important now, two memories remain.

The first was his temperament. Carter treated me as his intellectual equal. I was not. He was a Nobel laureate, a seasoned politician weathered by decades of difficult negotiations and impossible decisions, a sui generis diplomat who had once led the most powerful country in the world. I was a 19-year-old kid with an opinion.

The former president would have been well within his rights to brush aside my arguments, perhaps quipping: “Funny, I don’t remember seeing you at Camp David.” But he didn’t. Instead, he engaged me on the merits of my arguments and did his best to change my mind.

That’s the second thing: The former president did change my mind.

As he made the case for open dialogue and direct engagement between Israelis and Palestinians, I pelted him with provocations, trying to pierce his logic: How could negotiations work when one party had taken such an extreme position? What about that red-line issue? Isn’t that a nonstarter? This was a mindset I had learned in the Jewish day schools and summer camps of my youth and that had been reinforced in the traumatized post-9/11 America where I first developed a political consciousness.

Carter sensed this; he had clearly met my type before. Patient but firm, he introduced an idea that would eventually form a new groove in my brain, one that grew deeper with every passing year. “My friend,” he said, “I believe any time can be a time for peace talks.”

He meant this literally, of course; the former president had practiced this philosophy to mixed effect amid the bleakest moments in the Middle East and elsewhere, in Haiti and Venezuela, in North Africa and the Korean Peninsula. He was trying to teach me something about geopolitics.

But in the same breath he was making a profound argument about our inner lives: In more ordinary relationships, as in our politics, it is precisely when all feels broken beyond repair that we must choose, however hopeless it may feel, to begin finding our way back to wholeness and to one another. It took me years to understand that this older man, who practiced a faith different from mine and led in a time so removed from our own, represented not a bygone era but rather a radical vision for the future, a world I could not yet see.

I have listened for Carter’s voice as I’ve charted my own career in public service, work that often demands painful compromise and stubborn persistence. I’ve tried, too, with varying degrees of success, to heed his message in my personal life, when people I love have disappointed me or, more often, when I have disappointed them.

Whatever one might think of Carter’s position on a particular international conflict or the sum total of his tumultuous presidency, on this I have come to believe he was prophetic: We will never want for reasons to give up on peace, or on each other; but if we are to build a better, more just paradigm, then we must nourish a deeper optimism, a resilient faith, perhaps even grace.

Eventually, our conversation ran its natural course. Carter took a breath and then smiled, as if to say that a little more life lived might allow us to recognize what he had seen long ago. “This is what I know,” he said. “It is never too late to begin working for peace.” Then he called on the next student.