On 1 October, former US president Jimmy Carter celebrated his centenary as the first former US president to have lived for a century.
However, there are also many other important milestones in Carter’s life and more particularly in his public life that have not been confined to the period he served as US president between January 1977 and January 1981 but have gone well beyond it. The roles and activities that Carter has undertaken since leaving office have been diverse and impactful, and they continued until just a few years ago.
One of the most important developments which took place during his presidency that will remain in the memory particularly of people from this region was the Camp David Accords signed in September 1978 by late president of Egypt Anwar Al-Sadat and late Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Carter and US diplomacy more generally played a crucial role in arriving at these accords.
They had two components, one dealing with the relationship between Egypt and Israel and the other with that between Israel and the Palestinian people. Although the second component of the accords never materialised, the first was translated into the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty signed in March 1979.
The accords gave Carter a prominent place in US history as the first US president to have achieved a breakthrough, even if only a partial one, in the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The accords were the first time that a framework for the settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict was put on paper and signed by the prime minister of Israel and the president of Egypt, the largest Arab country and a main party in that conflict since its inception.
This was the case even though the accords contained nothing specific as far as the settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was concerned and did not address the Israeli occupation of other Arab territories apart from those of Egypt.
Carter’s presidency also witnessed another important development for our region. Unlike the Camp David Accords, seen from the US perspective as one of Carter’s most important foreign policy achievements, another development that took place in the Middle East during his time in office was seen as a failure on his part to demonstrate US leadership in the region and the wider world. This development was the victory of the Iranian Revolution in February 1979, leading to the overthrow of the then Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was a major ally of the US in the region.
The developments that followed in Iran were even more dramatic for the US, as diplomatic relations were severed between the two countries and a period of enmity started that has continued until today. This has been the case despite attempts throughout this period to mend US-Iranian relations. The situation was further complicated when Iranian revolutionary students stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took members of its staff hostage from November 1979 to January 1981, ending only hours before the newly elected Republican president Ronald Reagan officially took office.
The Iran hostage crisis had a hugely negative impact on Carter’s domestic popularity, and it gave rise to a feeling of humiliation among large sectors of the US population worried that the administration could apparently not protect US diplomats abroad. These feelings multiplied in the aftermath of the disastrous failure of Operation Eagle Claw, launched by the US in an attempt to free the hostages and leading to further deterioration in Carter’s popularity. All these developments played a major role in his defeat in the November 1980 presidential elections.
On the intellectual level, Carter will be remembered for his attempts to incorporate elements he derived from his understanding of Christianity into his methods and style of rule. He was keen to underline the importance of integrity when dealing with others, for example, whether domestically or internationally, during his time as US president. This could be attributed to his religious upbringing and to his commitment to the teachings of his religion.
This understanding of the Christian religion was also totally different from the one that started to appear in US politics and society during the rule of his successor, the late Republican president Ronald Reagan, in the rise of the religious right. This tendency has been growing in strength since then, and it is opposed to the tolerant and open-minded understanding of Christian teachings held by Carter.
After leaving office, Carter continued to play an active and influential role domestically and internationally for decades, notably in the role he played in taking measures to isolate, weaken, and eventually overthrow the Apartheid regime in South Africa until its final dismantling in 1994. This helped to create a solid friendship between Carter and the late South African leader Nelson Mandela. When the latter ended his time in office as the first president of a democratic South Africa and founded the Elders Organisation in 2007 that was intended to continue his work for peace and justice he included Carter among the first members of this organisation.
In 2012 and 2013, I had the opportunity to meet Carter more than once when he was undertaking missions to the Middle East as part of his role as one of the Elders along with other members of this organisation. As a result of these visits, Carter concluded, drawing on attempts by successive Israeli governments to link the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank with Israel, that such measures made it very difficult to implement the two-state solution on the ground despite its broad international support, including from the US, since June 2002.
Carter attributed such difficulties to the expansion of the settlements in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank and of the infrastructure built by successive Israeli governments to link these settlements with Israel within its 1948 borders.
From Carter’s perspective, these Israeli measures were turning Palestinian towns and cities in the West Bank into the kind of Bantustans that segments of the African population of South Africa had lived in under the Apartheid regime. He presented these conclusions in his controversial book “Palestine: Peace not Apartheid” published in 2006.
The activities and contributions made by former US president Jimmy Carter have been so many and so rich both when he was serving as president and since he left office that he will long be remembered as a figure who played an important role in our region and in the wider world.
The writer is a diplomat and commentator.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 October, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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