Of all Jimmy Carter’s legacies, his involvement with the Middle East may have been the most complex and consequential, and perhaps the most painfully incomplete.
At its heart is a landmark peace agreement that has lasted perhaps half a century.
A deeply religious man, Carter had a passionate attachment to a troubled land that he held sacred in the truest sense of the word. But as the decades passed, he became increasingly disillusioned with the imbalance of power and its corrosive effect on the two peoples.
Former President Carter is interviewed for the “Presidential Gatekeepers” project at the Carter Center in Atlanta in 2011.
(David Hume Kennerley/Getty Images)
The former president, who died Sunday at the age of 100 and drew tributes from around the world, sometimes seemed awkward and out of place in the corridors of power. He became more comfortable around suffering and downtrodden people.
But during the long and fruitful years of the Carter Presidency, the foresight and innate common sense he brought to issues such as global public health and conflict resolution helped maintain peace between Israel and Israel. In fact, it was not immediately reflected in the method used to find it. those neighbors.
Biographer Kai Byrd called him a prophet of the wilderness. And Byrd said prophets are often unpopular.
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The landmark peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, at the time the undisputed leader of the Arab world, was established at Camp Camp, the presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains that gave the agreement its name. David almost made it happen.
Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left), President Carter (center), and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem begin holding hands outside the White House after signing the peace treaty on March 26, 1979.
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There, in September 1978, Carter served as mediator for more than a dozen days of grueling talks between Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Stuart Eisenstat, a diplomat and former aide to President Carter, said Begin’s acrimonious behavior extended to the point where he was angrily packing up his belongings to leave. A slow gesture made him stop.
Eisenstadt’s Carter wrote that each of the Israeli prime minister’s eight beloved grandchildren was individually engraved with pictures of the three leaders. The implicit message: the sacrifices made in that moment for peace are for them.
He began to remain at Camp David. The agreement was signed, and the following year Egypt recognized Israel as a sovereign state, but for the first time as a mortal enemy. The Sinai Peninsula, captured by Israel in 1967, was returned to Egypt in 1982, a year after Mr. Carter, then widely derided in the United States, left office.
Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat greet each other at Camp David on September 6, 1978.
(Hum Images / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Carter and those around him hoped the deal would eventually pave the way for broader regional peace centered around an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians.
But over the years, occasional bouts of progress were halted by bouts of bloodshed, and a generation later, on October 7, 2023, Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis, and Israel moved into Gaza, where authorities say they were killed. They retaliated with an invasion. More than 45,000 Palestinians.
“Mr. Carter was disappointed that the comprehensive deal he was looking for was never completed,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East negotiator who frequently interacts with Mr. Carter.
Begin and Sadat jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, but Carter himself won the award in 2002 for his work on peace and human rights around the world.
Miller said he believes history will support the view that Carter’s accomplishments at Camp David “were no better than any other deal that any president has negotiated in the history of Middle East peace efforts.” Ta.
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It was almost 30 years after that diplomatic victory that Mr. Carter, with his usual cool deliberation, exploded into the Middle East debate with a 288-page bombshell.
Former President Carter holds a copy of his book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid” during a 2006 book signing in Tempe, Arizona.
(Paul Connors/Associated Press)
In his 2006 book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, the former president drew direct parallels between Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and South Africa’s system of racially based legal segregation and repression. .
Recalling the daily searing racial injustice he witnessed as a child in rural Georgia, Carter said that Israel was a country where Jewish settlers, supported by Israel’s powerful military, He wrote that he had created a system of domination over the Palestinian majority, who were systematically stripped of their humanity and citizenship. right.
Mr. Carter’s image as a kindly elder statesman, friend of world Jewry, and bulwark of Israel’s security was quickly shattered. Supporters of Israel in the United States pushed back, arguing that Mr. Carter had lost the objectivity that had guided him at Camp David. More than a dozen prominent members of the advisory board of the Carter Center, a nonprofit he founded with his wife Rosalyn, have resigned in protest.
The former president was undaunted. In a 2007 interview with the nonprofit organization Democracy Now!, he said the word apartheid, which means “diaspora” in Afrikaans, was “exactly accurate.”
He said Palestinians “cannot even drive on the same roads that Israelis have created and constructed inside Palestinian territory.” “Israeli people have never seen Palestinians, except for Israeli soldiers. Palestinians never see Israelis from a distance, except for Israeli soldiers. We are absolutely and completely divided, and we are in a much worse situation than we were in South Africa.”
On December 11, 2006, former President Carter appears to be promoting his book “Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid” at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena.
(David McNew/Getty Images)
According to the classic definition of apartheid, Carter added: And Israelis have complete control over the lives of Palestinians. ”
Byrd, his biographer, argues that Mr. Carter’s intense personal involvement in the Camp David talks led critics and some Israeli officials to label him as anti-Semitism of the worst kind, and some conservatives. found consistency in deciding to uphold the comparison that insults Mr. Carter. Now after his death.
The day after Carter’s death, Byrd appeared on “PBS News Hour” and praised the Camp David accords as an “extraordinary episode in personal diplomacy,” but he said Begin, who died in 1992, had failed to live up to the main expectations. The former president said he was disappointed. The cornerstone of this agreement is the movement towards Palestinian self-determination.
President Sadat was assassinated in October 1981, just three years after that historic meeting. Tensions in the region rose again, and yet another war broke out in 1982, between Israel and Lebanon.
Mr. Carter consciously dedicated the last decades of his life to “warning Israelis that if settlement construction in the West Bank continued, we were on the path to apartheid,” Mr. Byrd said. spoke.
But it took years for that view and the term apartheid to penetrate mainstream political discussion about the Middle East.
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Egyptian President Anwar Sadat (left) shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem as President Carter looks on at Camp David on September 7, 1978.
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The Israeli government’s official response to Carter’s death was notable for its narrowness. His post-presidency period of more than 40 years has gone largely unnoticed, with his long-gone breakthrough in the mountains of Maryland the main focus.
“We will always remember President Carter’s role in concluding the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty…a peace treaty that has lasted nearly half a century and brings hope to future generations.” Benjamin Netanyahu the Prime Minister wrote.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog described Carter as a courageous leader who built “peace between Israel and Egypt, which decades later remains a bastion of stability across the Middle East and North Africa.” praised.
Egypt also gave a respectful, if slightly insensitive, assessment. “He will be remembered as one of the world’s most distinguished leaders for his service to humanity,” President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi said in a statement.
Commentary in some Israeli media noted persistent anger over accusations of apartheid. Haaretz newspaper quoted Aron Pincus, who once served as Israel’s consul general in New York, as saying, “Jimmy Carter resents Israeli leaders for holding a mirror they don’t want to see.” The headline read, “It was.”
The outbreak of the current war in Gaza has accelerated a change in the vocabulary of international legal and human rights organizations.
Earlier this year, Human Rights Watch called Israel’s treatment and “deprivation and subjugation” of nearly 5 million Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip “a deprivation so severe as to amount to a crime.” It was concluded that. Against the humanity of apartheid and persecution. ”
Miller, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Carter was appalled by the depth of resentment from many American Jews over his criticism of Israel, and that the altercation left a lasting scar. Ta.
Miller said, “While Carter cooperated with the Camp David Accords, he never got over his feelings of betrayal and abandonment by the Jewish community, to which he felt he had become a bogeyman.” I couldn’t do it,” he said.
Still, the former president stood by his decision.
“This is Jimmy Carter,” biographer Byrd said in an interview on PBS. “He was just relentless.”
Memorials to Carter are expected to fill much of next week in his home state of Georgia and the nation’s capital.
Former President George H.W. Bush, President-elect Barack Obama, President George W. Bush, former Presidents Clinton and Carter pose together in the Oval Office at the White House on January 7, 2009. This is the fifth time all five presidents have posed together. They appeared together.
(David Hume Kennerley/Getty Images)
The five living presidents who have succeeded him have all, in their own ways, admired him publicly, although their Middle East peace efforts have sometimes been successful, but have often failed. I showed my respect on the spot.
Mr. Carter’s body will lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda next Tuesday and Wednesday. A funeral service will be held at the National Cathedral the next day (President Biden has declared it a national day of mourning), followed by a private burial in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.
Perhaps the memorial will focus on the humble peanut farmer-turned-president, a tireless humanitarian and a hard-working but sometimes flawed man.
And about perhaps his most difficult role and most elusive prize winner: that of peacebuilder.
Mr. King and Mr. Wilkinson are both former Jerusalem bureau chiefs for the Los Angeles Times.
