Jimmy Carter: Peace broker, settlements critic, advocate for Soviet Jews, rights activist

WASHINGTON (JTA) – Jimmy Carter, the one-term president who brokered the historic Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt but earned pariah status in some corners of the Jewish community for his criticisms of Israel, has died.

Carter, who had remained active into his final years despite a 2015 diagnosis of liver cancer, died Sunday at 100 at his home in Plains, Georgia, his nonprofit announced.

Carter’s work at Camp David in 1978 led to the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state and radically changed the landscape of the Middle East, diminishing — for the first time in Israel’s history — the threat of regional war. Over 13 days, Carter personally authored 23 drafts of the accord and negotiated separately with both sides after it became clear they could not reach an agreement directly.

Carter grew increasingly critical of Israel in the years after he left the Oval Office, culminating with the 2006 publication of his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.” While arguments over the book led some in the Jewish world to accuse the former president of antisemitism, others saw the fight as obscuring a legacy that should be heralded.

“It’s unfair not to see Carter in the full context of what he achieved,” said Stuart Eizenstat, who served as Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor and is now the State Department’s special advisor on Holocaust issues. “He should have been a heroic figure.”

In 1978, against the advice of his advisors, Carter invited then Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to the presidential retreat in the Catoctin mountains near Washington. Carter’s approval ratings were then at an all-time low, the economy was in shambles, and neither Begin nor Sadat seemed primed to reach the kind of agreement that would justify such an expenditure of presidential time and goodwill. But Carter’s gamble worked.

“Carter was the hero of Camp David,” said Aharon Barak, the longtime chief justice of the Israeli Supreme Court and a former chief advisor to Begin. “We were sitting I think eight or nine days together. We ate, we did a prayer, we thought of problems, and [we] would sit and sit until late, late at night. Which other president of the United States would be willing to do this?”

Carter wanted the agreement to include a timetable for the end of Israeli settlements, but in the final deal, the issue was set aside. In recent years, his undisguised frustration with the growth of settlements, and with the Israeli government more generally, earned him opprobrium that bordered on vitriol in the Jewish world.

Carter was often unsparing in his critiques of Israeli leaders, settlement policy, and the continued Jewish presence in the Palestinian territories. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointedly did not meet with Carter during the former president’s 2015 trip to Israel. Carter, in turn, told the press that a two-state solution was nearly out of reach as long as Netanyahu remained in power, while Hamas, the Palestinian group designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, was interested in peace.

But it was his 2006 book that most rankled the Jewish community. The text was widely criticized as lopsided in its assessment of the failure of peace negotiations. In no small part, it was the use of the term apartheid itself, a word he later walked back and became reluctant to use in public.

“The title is to de-legitimize Israel, because if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn’t really deserve to be a democratic state,” said Abraham Foxman, then the national director of the Anti-Defamation League. “He’s provoking, he’s outrageous, and he’s bigoted.”

In 2009, in a letter released exclusively to JTA, Carter offered an “Al Chet” prayer of atonement for any words that may have “stigmatize[d] Israel.”

Carter was an early and fervent advocate for the rights of Soviet Jews. After Natan – then Anatoly – Sharansky was arrested in 1977, Sharanksy’s wife Avital lobbied the White House to publicly “prove” her husband was not an American spy. In an unusual move, Carter agreed to state publicly that Sharansky was not involved in espionage.

In 1978, Carter laid the groundwork for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum with the creation of the Presidential Commission on the Holocaust. Chaired by Elie Wiesel, the commission recommended the establishment of a national Holocaust museum in Washington.

During the 1979 Iranian revolution, Jewish Iranians attempting to flee to the United States hit obstacles in consulates abroad. Eizenstat and White House Counsel Robert Lipschutz successfully lobbied Carter to create a special — ostensibly temporary — visa that enabled some 50,000 Iranian Jews to enter the United States after the fall of the shah. The visa status was ultimately also used by Iranian Christians and Bahais.

But the years of his presidency, beset by economic woes and the Iranian hostage crisis — in which 52 Americans were held by Iranian students for 444 days — took the glow from his foreign policy wins. Carter’s failure to secure reelection in 1980 is often attributed to his perceived fecklessness in Iran. In that election, Carter won only 45 percent of the Jewish vote, a historic low for a Democrat.

James Earl Carter, Jr. was born in Plains, “a small town in South Georgia with 683 people in it,” as Carter liked to say. Like his father before him, Carter was a peanut farmer. He married Rosalynn in 1946. The couple had four children.

Carter felt quite keenly the need to address the violent racial history of the south. He did not join the White Citizens Council when he returned from eight years in the Navy. It was 1953, his father had just died and Carter was shifting gears to life on the farm. His political career began on the school board. He went on to the Georgia State Senate and eventually the governor’s mansion.

When he became governor of Georgia – also a position he would hold for only one term — he famously announced, “The time for racial discrimination is over.” He saw himself as a champion for the oppressed.

A deeply religious man, Carter was unabashed in describing his relationship with God while on the presidential campaign trail in 1976. On his first trip to Israel, in 1973, Carter asked to dip in the waters of the Jordan River. In meeting then-prime minister Golda Meir on that same trip, he wrote in his 2006 book, he warned her that nothing good had come for the Jews when they had turned from God. The secular prime minister, he reported, was bemused.

In the 45 years since he lost his 1980 reelection bid to Ronald Reagan — the longest post-presidency in US history — Carter was widely celebrated for his work on human rights, hunger reduction, and the pursuit of free elections around the globe through the Carter Center, the Atlanta-based nonprofit he founded in 1982 with his wife.

Carter’s religious commitments were part of his motivation to seek peace in the Middle East and for his post-presidential work on poverty and conflict resolution. He was a member of the Elders, a global collective of elder statesmen working on peace and human rights. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

“In Judaism, we say ‘Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh.’ (All Jews are responsible for one another),”  Tamara Cofman Wittes said in a 2015 interview when she was director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “I think for President Carter, that was a sentiment that applied to all humanity.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.