NEWSRAEL: Israelis will always remember Jimmy Carter with a large amount of ambivalence in which he was a staunch leader of anti-Israel critics and caved into the Iranian revolution which has plagued the Middle East for decades.
(Dec. 29, 2024 / JNS) Former President Jimmy Carter died “peacefully” at his home in Plains, Ga., surrounded by family on Sunday at the age of 100, the Carter Center announced.
He leaves behind a legacy as a lifelong humanitarian, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, and a one-term presidency that was mired in domestic challenges and a mixed foreign policy.
Carter’s term in office from 1977 to 1981 was defined by what he described in a 1979 speech as a “crisis of confidence” and what others termed “malaise”: high unemployment, double-digit inflation and slow economic growth.
In foreign policy, he presided over some of the most significant developments of the Cold War, and many of his decisions remain controversial. In 1977, Carter signed the Panama Canal Treaty, which handed over control of the U.S. Panama Canal Zone to the Panamanians in 1979 and the canal itself to them in 1999. (On Dec. 21, President-elect Donald Trump accused Panama of violating that treaty, saying that if Panama did not change its behavior he would “demand that the Panama Canal be returned to us, in full.”)
In 1978, Carter led the Camp David negotiations that made peace between Israel and Egypt—the first peace treaty establishing relations between the Jewish state and one of its Arab neighbors.
The Iranian revolution and the subsequent oil crisis and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—all in 1979—posed a sufficient threat to U.S. energy security to prompt Carter to announce that Washington would respond militarily to threats to its interests in the Persian Gulf under the eponymous “Carter Doctrine.” (That doctrine remains a basis for U.S. policy in the region.)
Carter’s post-presidential forays into international politics proved more controversial. In 2006, he published Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which critics denounced as being biased against Israel and insufficiently condemnatory of terrorist groups.
“The book contains numerous distortions of history and interpretation and apparently, outright fabrications as well,” the Central Conference of American Rabbis, a Reform Judaism rabbinical organization, wrote in 2007. “Its use of the term ‘apartheid’ to describe conditions in the West Bank serves only to demonize and delegitimize Israel in the eyes of the world.”