Jimmy Carter, the 39th US president and driving force behind the Camp David Accords, which eventually led to the Israel-Egypt peace treaty in 1979, died on the 29 December 2024 at the age of 100, surrounded by his family at his home in Plains, Georgia, said the Carter Centre.
Although only in power for one term, from 1977 until 1980, Carter’s policies and actions during several pivotal events in the Middle East have had a lasting impact on the region, and represented some of his biggest triumphs and challenges.
“Jimmy Carter deserves much more credit for his presidency than he has been given and particularly his role in the Middle East,” said Bruce Riedel, former CIA analyst and a nonresident senior fellow in the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution.
“In many ways, you could say the modern Middle East was shaped by Jimmy Carter.”
Carter, one of only four US presidents to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, was born in 1924 in Plains, Georgia, a small farming town where his father, Earl, worked as a businessman and his mother, Lillian, as a nurse at the hospital where he was born.
He was the first president to be born in a hospital and lived for much of his childhood in a farmhouse without running water or electricity. He also grew up as the only white child among around 200 African-Americans.
“All my friends were African-American,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 2015. “The people with whom I worked in the field, and the people with whom I wrestled and fought, with whom I went fishing and hunting, were all African-Americans.”
His classmates in the highly segregated town, however, were white. Advisors say this childhood, including the example set by his mother who treated black and white patients and invited black neighbours into their home, left Carter with an awareness of racism and human rights which he would bring to his foreign policies, including those for the Middle East.
Jimmy Carter (right) takes office as the 39th President of the United States in January 1977 (AFP)
Carter served for seven years as a naval officer after graduating from the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland with distinction in 1946.
In 1953, after his father died of cancer, Carter left the Navy to return to Plains and take over the family’s peanut farm, warehouse and store. In 1962 he was elected to Georgia’s state Senate where he served two terms. He failed in his first bid to become governor in 1966, before finally being elected in 1970, making waves with an inauguration speech in which he called time on racial discrimination in his home state.
“At the end of a long campaign, I believe I know our people of this state as well as anyone could,” he said. “Based on this knowledge of Georgians, north and south, rural and urban, liberal and conservative, I say to you quite frankly that the time for racial discrimination is over.”
Biographer Jonathan Alter has argued that Carter was largely silent about his views on civil rights to protect his business and political prospects until that speech, given how high-profile the issue had been in the US throughout the 1950s and 1960s.
Nonetheless, the speech launched the Washington outsider into the national eye, landed him on the cover of Time magazine and paved the way in 1976, the year of the United States Bicentennial, for his presidential campaign - and win - over Republican incumbent President Gerald Ford.
Egypt and Israel make peace
While Carter’s presidency - fairly or otherwise - is often remembered for its domestic failures, including a major energy crisis, and low approval ratings, arguably his highest and lowest moments involved the Middle East.
From day one of his presidency, Carter sought a comprehensive settlement to the tensions between Arab countries and Israel which had sparked three decades of conflict after Israel declared its independence in 1948.
Straight away, Carter and his Secretary of State Cyrus Vance tried to reconvene a 1973 conference in Geneva, which then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had established to end the Arab-Israeli dispute.
By the summer of 1978, after a landmark speech by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in the Knesset and months of talks between Egypt and Israel, negotiations had stalled. Against the advice of his advisors, Carter invited Sadat - with whom he had exchanged handwritten letters - and Prime Minister Menachim Begin to his presidential retreat at Camp David in Maryland.
Over “13 long days”, as Carter later described the time, he shuttled between the two leaders who “were like two scorpions in the bottle”, according to Stuart Eizenstat, one of Carter’s advisors and author of a Carter biography, who spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018.
US President Jimmy Carter (centre) with Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat (left) and Israeli Premier Menachem Begin at the White House, Washington in March 1979 (AFP)
“We tried to get them together the first one of those thirteen days. It was a disaster,” Eizenstat said.
Carter, he said, used personal touches to bring the two closer together, taking them to the Gettysburg battlefield where more than 50,000 soldiers were killed during three days of fighting in July 1863 amid the American Civil War.
On the 13th day, Eizsenstat said, Begin asked for a White House car to take him to Andrews Air Force Base. “I’m not bluffing, Mr President. I cannot and will not compromise anymore,” he recalled Begin saying.
Knowing Begin’s deep love for his eight grandchildren in Israel, Carter autographed a photo of the three leaders at Camp David saying “best wishes for peace” with each of the names of the children.
“Begin goes through each of their names, reads them aloud, his lips quiver, his eyes tear, he puts his bags down. He said, ‘Mr President, I’ll make one last try’,” said Eizsenstat.
At the signing of the Camp David Accords on 17 September 1978 at the White House, Carter, with noticeable bags under his eyes, said the prayers of the three men which began the long 13 days had been answered “far beyond any expectation”.
“We are privileged to witness tonight a significant achievement in the cause of peace, an achievement none thought possible a year ago, or even a month ago, an achievement that reflects the courage and wisdom of these two leaders,” he said.
The eventual landmark agreement made at Camp David would produce the framework for the Israel-Egyptian peace treaty of March 1979. All three men would win the Nobel Peace Prize: Begin and Sadat in 1978; and Carter in 2002.
Eizenstat described it as “the greatest single act of personal diplomacy in presidential history of the entire country” - and a peace which has lasted for more than 40 years.
It was not without cost: less than three years later, in October 1981, Sadat was assassinated by members of Egyptian militant group Islamic Jihad who were opposed to the deal.
With hindsight, many historians now regard Camp David as a deal with a mixed legacy. It brought peace - a cold peace - to the Israelis and Egyptians, but the Palestinians were left out of the equation, a solution to their struggles left for a later day that has never come.
Carter biographer Kai Bird, however, said the president’s diary tells a different story. “He thought he had included in the accords a path forward for solving that larger Palestinian-Israeli conflict, something that would, according to his diary, lead eventually to some kind of self-rule for the Palestinians,” Bird said in 2021.
Specifically, Carter thought Begin had settled on a five-year freeze on any settlement activity in the West Bank, a detail that was to be solidified in a letter that Begin was to sign before leaving Camp David, Kai said.
“He substituted another letter and, by that time, they were literally scheduled to announce the accords on the White House lawn within hours,” the historian said.
“Within weeks [the Israelis] were building big new settlements in the West Bank in the wake of Camp David. And Carter just regarded this as a betrayal.”
Disaster of Iran hostage crisis
Perhaps the lowest moment of Carter’s presidency was one that he could not have predicted and which was to cost him a second term in office: the Iran hostage crisis.
On 4 November 1979, Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage.
Their action was in protest at the fact that Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, deposed as Shah of Iran the previous February had just been admitted to a US hospital for cancer treatment.
The crisis predated the shah’s exit. Less than two years before, Carter and his wife, Rosalynn - at their request - had spent New Years Eve 1977, his first as US President, with the Shah and his wife, the Shahbanu, in Tehran.
“Iran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world,” Carter told guests at a state dinner that the Shah threw for him that evening. “This is a great tribute to you, Your Majesty, and to your leadership and to the respect and the admiration and love which your people give to you.”
But Carter couldn’t have been more wrong, his advisors now say.
Eizenstat said: “We didn’t realise - the CIA didn’t tell the president - that the shah had lost all of his domestic support.”
The crisis gripped the US, including an entire evening news show focused solely on the hostage crisis (which would later evolve into Nightline). For months, and under intense pressure and scrutiny, Carter attempted to resolve the kidnappings diplomatically - without success.
Carter ordered US armed forces to rescue US hostages from Iran - but the mission ended in disaster (file)
Then on 25 April 1980 he ordered Operation Eagle Claw, a clandestine US Armed Forces mission to retrieve the hostages from Tehran.
But the rescue was aborted when several of the helicopters involved had technical problems. As US forces were leaving a desert staging area, one of the helicopters crashed into a transport aircraft. The bodies of the eight US servicemen who were killed were later put on public display by Iranian officials. For the US, it was a humiliating disaster.
“There was no fighting; there was no combat. But to my deep regret, eight of the crewmen of the two aircraft which collided were killed, and several other Americans were hurt in the accident,” Carter told the American public in an address.
“It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation. It was my decision to cancel it when problems developed in the placement of our rescue team for a future rescue operation. The responsibility is fully my own.”
And for Carter, the failed rescue, the worst US military setback since it was forced from Vietnam, was a political nightmare. It also came just over six months before Americans decided whether to give him a second term in the White House.
On 20 January 1981, the hostages were eventually freed, five minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as US president. Carter had fulfilled his promise to bring the hostages back alive, but the 444-day long episode is widely regarded as the biggest failure of his tenure.
How the Carter Doctrine planned the future
Beyond the Camp David Accords and the Iran hostage crisis, it is Carter’s 1980 State of the Union Address that has perhaps left the most significant - and unintended - impact on the Middle East.
In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Carter, as declassified documents show, had already approved secret cash and non-military support for mujahideen fighters resisting the Russians which started months before the invasion.
But for the US, the invasion was a red line. It was in this context that Carter declared in his January 1980 speech that the Persian Gulf was now considered vital to US security interests and worth fighting for.
“Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force,” Carter said.
In the process, Carter sought to prevent the Soviet Union from seizing the Persian Gulf, conscious that the Shah had only just been driven from office and that oil from the area would be vital to the prosperity of the US.
But Andrew Bachevich, historian and co-founder of the Washington, DC-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft told Middle East Eye, the Soviet Union had no such designs. “The Soviets had neither the intention, nor the capability of seizing control of the Persian Gulf,” he said.
Nonetheless, Carter’s words started a US military buildup in the region that had “the unintended consequence of basically setting us up for a series of disastrous military interventions”, he said.
US President Jimmy Carter (left) and Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the USSR, prior to signing the SALT II arms treaty in Vienna, Austria, on 18 June 1979 (AFP)
Several changes were needed to fulfil the Carter Doctrine, including the establishment of US Central Command - the first US military command focused on the Middle East; the drafting of war plans for potential interventions in the region; and negotiated US access rights to bases.
Within a decade, the Soviet Union collapsed. “So what then is left for the military machinery that has been created in response to the Carter Doctrine,” said Bachevich. “It turns out there is another enemy that presents itself and that’s Sadaam Hussein.”
And so the preparations for war against the Soviet Union were ultimately used for the Persian Gulf War from 1990-91. They also remained in place for other US operations, most notably the Iraq War that began in 2003.
“President Carter envisioned none of this. He didn’t say ‘I’ve got a great idea. I’m going to declare a Carter Doctrine so we can go invade Iraq someday.’ That was not the idea,” said Bacevich.
Carter, Israel and apartheid
In the four decades since he left the White House, Carter spent much of his time pursuing peace initiatives, including in Sudan and as one of the co-founders of The Elders, a group of global leaders working together for peace and human rights, never shying away from controversy.
Carter produced 33 books after leaving office. At first he wrote through necessity: when he entered the White House, the family business was put in a blind trust to avoid any partiality; when he left, the peanut farm was $1m in debt.
Former US president Jimmy Carter arrives in Ramallah, West Bank, in January 2006 to meet with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas (AFP)
Perhaps his most controversial book was Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, published in 2006 heavily criticised not only for its title but also for its contents which some argued was slanted against Israel. “This is a strange little book,” a review in the New York Times began.
In it, he gave an overview of how the Israelis and Palestinians can finally achieve peace, arguing that a resolution will not come until Israel stopped oppressing the Palestinian people.
Specifically, he argued that within the occupied Palestinian territories, a system of apartheid has developed, not based on racism, but based on the desire of a minority of Israelis to confiscate Palestinian land.
Fifteen councillors of the Carter Center, which the former president established at Emory University in 1982 to promote human rights and conflict resolution, quit as a result. Carter told journalists he had been called an anti-semite, a bigot and senile.
Why, asked National Public Radio, had he chosen to use the word “apartheid”?
“This is a very accurate description of the forced separation within the West Bank of Israels from Palestinians and the total domination and oppression of Palestinians by the dominant Israeli military,” Carter said.
In the years since, the use of the word “apartheid” in relation to Israel has been used by major human rights organisations and, most recently, by South Africa's lawyers at the International Court of Justice.
One of the Carter Center board members who resigned in 2006 subsequently wrote that he had not been convinced by Carter's explanations at the time, but had concluded in the intervening years that he was "likely right" and wrote to the former president to apologise.
A week later, he received a hand-written response.
"You have no reason to apologise, but I accept your wonderful letter as you obviously intend it. I sympathise and understand the feelings of my many friends, who reacted as you did," Carter wrote, adding in a post script, "You would be welcome back as a councilor."
Carter is survived by four children, 12 grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren. His wife Rosalynn Carter died in November 2023.
