Former President Jimmy Carter offered the following words today in a letter addressed to the Jewish community: “We must recognize Israel’s achievements under difficult circumstances, even as we strive in a positive way to help Israel continue to improve its relations with its Arab populations, but we must not permit criticisms for improvement to stigmatize Israel. As I would have noted at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, but which is appropriate at any time of the year, I offer an Al Het for any words or deeds of mine that may have done so.”
The remarks, like many of Mr. Carters past comments, appear well-intentioned and sincerely offered. And, like so many of his past utterances, mix profound sensitivity with much potentially unhelpful ideological baggage.
For starters, who is the “we” to whom he refers?

If it is only himself, them he should say “I” and be done with it. Doing otherwise distances him from the responsibility he claims to take. On the other hand, if he is speaking for others, it would be helpful to know for who he speaks. Are these comments also an admission that he has rallied a great many people to a position which he now regrets having taken? If so, that too should be noted.
It’s also somewhat troubling that his comments are offered to the “Jewish community”. His past comments were not problematic because they offended Jews, they were problematic because they were often based on faulty comparisons and flawed analyses of very complex realities which did not fit with Carter’s idealized understandings of “big bad Israel” and “good little Palestine”. On the other hand, when Jews scream “anti-Semite” at every critic of Israel, as too many do, we help create the very pitfall into which Mr. Carter fell.
Of course, it could be that his knowledge of Jewish prayer is such that he follows its practice of speaking, at least in the case of the Al Het penitentiary prayers to which he refers, in the collective “we”. If that is the case, then his words are a profound statement that he stands with the Jewish people as one who enters a synagogue on the holy days, as one who sees his fate bound up with other members of that prayer community, and as one who is willing to bear that fate alongside them.
If that is the case, then his actions will soon bear out his words and this will prove to be a momentous moment in Mr. Carter’s relationship with Israel and the Jewish people. It would represent a shift from his being an outsider, admittedly one animated by wonderful ideals, to one who accepts that the pursuit of such ideals has real implications for people including him and their security. I hope that President Carter’s words represent that shift because whatever road to peace will be found in the Middle East, will demand that sense of shared fate, if not destiny, by all people in the region.