When Jimmy Carter entered office in 1977, he had an ambitious plan to pursue a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace process that would guarantee Palestinian statehood and rights.
Over the next three years, however, the process fell apart. The initial blow came four months after Carter was sworn in. For the first time, Israeli voters handed control of the Knesset to a right-wing government led by new Prime Minster Menachim Begin. Begin took a hard line in terms of the peace process, and his refusal to make concessions made securing any regional deal difficult.
Further plaguing Carter's efforts throughout 1977, the Arab states were completely divided over how to represent themselves at a peace conference. They split over questions of what a self-governing Palestinian entity—or, prior to that, even a Palestinian delegation—might look like. Indeed, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), recognized by the Arab states as “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people,” refused to recognize Israel’s right to exist (though they had previously signaled willingness to do so). On another front, Syrian President Hafez al-Assad insisted on the return of the Golan Heights, which the Israelis had captured in the 1967 War, along with an agreeable solution for the Palestinian people.
Those were just a few examples of the hurdles that made it impossible even to bring all of the parties together to negotiate—let alone brokering a deal.
Additionally, in October of that year, the U.S. reneged on an agreement to host a comprehensive Middle East peace conference with the Soviet Union, due to a mix of domestic political pressure and advocacy by Israel. Because the Arab states had better relations with the Kremlin than with the White House, this drastically lowered the odds of the Arabs coming to the table. While Carter subsequently attempted to revive the comprehensive peace process, he never came closer to it than he did in his first year in office.
As Carter's hopes for a comprehensive Middle East peace deal crumbled, it left only the bilateral peace process between Egypt and Israel, which in 1978 culminated in the Camp David Accords and later the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty.