JERUSALEM — As President, Jimmy Carter he mediated individual peace agreement this removed Israel’s most powerful enemy from the battlefield. But decades later he drew the ire of the Israeli government when he said military rule over the Palestinians amounted to apartheid.
The Camp David peace accords signed by Israel and Egypt in 1978 remain the crowning achievement of decades of largely failed US involvement in the Middle East.
But for Carter, who died on Sunday at the age of 100They were clouded by what he saw as the continued oppression of the Palestinians and Israel expansion of settlements in the lands they want for a future state.
Carter did not speak publicly after being hospitalized for months before the explosion The latest war in Gaza. But he spent much of his life during and after his presidency trying to find a just solution to the broader conflict.
When Carter took office in 1977, Egypt and Israel fought four devastating wars, the last of which began with a surprise Egyptian attack in 1973 that initially seemed to threaten Israel’s existence.
Carter’s efforts led to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat’s landmark visit to Jerusalem and eventually saw US negotiators wear the famously hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
“There would be no peace agreement between Israel and Egypt without President Carter,” said former Israeli Attorney General and Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, who acted as Israel’s legal adviser during the negotiations.
Barak described Carter as a tough negotiator, forcing the parties to work from 6 a.m. until after midnight and getting into the smallest details.
“He was very tough, he knew what he wanted and he got what he wanted. And I admired him,” he said.
The first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab country saw Israel withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula in the 1967 Middle East war and establish full diplomatic relations with Egypt, which had led the Arab struggle against Israel since its founding in 1948. .
The two countries remain at peace almost half a century later.
Although the Camp David Accords called for a transition to Palestinian self-government in the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel also seized in 1967, it was never implemented. Carter was voted out of office two years later in the middle of the Iran hostage crisis, and Middle East peace efforts fizzled out.
When the Israelis and Palestinians finally came together to sign the Oslo Accords in 1993, it was similar to what Carter had written 15 years earlier, when a Palestinian Authority was created and Israel gradually withdrew from the occupied territories.
But the peace process stalled again in 2000, as the two sides failed to reach a final agreement at Camp David. A month later, an armed Palestinian uprising broke out, and Israel launched a severe military crackdown.
Carter was actively involved in the Middle East as a global campaigner for human rights and democracy, with his Carter Center monitoring the Palestinian elections. He spoke out against the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and called George W. Bush the worst president in the history of foreign affairs.
In a controversial speech, article and book entitled “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”, he called on the Palestinians to renounce violence and to end the US intervention in the conflict.
But he reserved some of his strongest language for Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, saying they were much more built up than people knew and undermined hopes for a negotiated settlement to the century-old conflict.
Most controversially, he said, the situation in the West Bank — where some 3 million Palestinians live under Israeli military rule alongside hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers with full citizenship — is apartheid.
In a 2007 interview to defend the book, Carter said the term was “a very accurate description” of “the complete domination and oppression of the Palestinians.”
Carter insisted that those were harsh words coming from someone who had devoted his life to trying to achieve a lasting peace for Israel, but few Israelis saw it that way. Supporters of Israel said the book was against him and contained several inaccuracies.
Any suggestion that Israel’s open rule over the Palestinians is apartheid is seen as an attack on its legitimacy. It states that its Arab minority has full citizenship, including the right to vote.
Barak rejected claims of apartheid, saying that as head of the Supreme Court he had directed numerous pro-Palestinian rulings against Israeli security agencies. “That’s not apartheid,” he said.
“He was a complicated person,” Barak said of Carter. “But on balance, I think he was a friend of Israel.”
The situation described by Carter has worsened for the Palestinians. There have been no peace talks for more than a decade, Israel is rapidly expanding settlements, and its far-right government supports the complete annexation of parts of the West Bank, making the establishment of a viable Palestinian state nearly impossible.
Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, on the other hand, have used Carter’s language to describe the conflict, and in recent years have published lengthy reports arguing that Israel is to blame. international crime of apartheid.
Omar Shakir, director of Israel and Palestine Human Rights Watch, said Carter’s words were devastating.
“Today, apartheid is the consensus within the global human rights movement and yet, while it is an increasingly transparent reality on the ground, few US and European leaders dare say the words President Carter did more than 16 years ago.” said Shakir.
In April 2008, an 83-year-old Carter toured the region with the Elders, a group of retired international leaders founded by Nelson Mandela. He once again courted controversy by meeting with senior leaders of the Islamic militant group Hamas, which recently seized control of the Gaza Strip. Hamas does not accept the existence of Israel and has carried out hundreds of deadly attacks over the years.
But Carter said he had obtained a personal commitment from Hamas to accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders if the deal is accepted in a Palestinian referendum, which could be a major step towards accepting Israel.
The Israeli government refused to meet with Carter, and both Israel and the US criticized the decision to meet with Hamas.
Israel and Hamas have fought five wars in Gaza, the deadliest of which was a bloody incursion by Hamas into southern Israel. October 7, 2023and it’s still running.
For Carter, now remembered worldwide as a statesman and humanitarian, the resolution of the conflict was a bitter disappointment.
”The most important foreign policy goal of my life has been to bring peace to Israel and peace and justice to Israel’s neighbors,” Carter told an Israeli newspaper during a 2008 visit.
“I’ve done everything I could in office and since I left office to do that.”
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Associated Press writer Josef Federman contributed.
