Jimmy Carter

Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid reached bookshops from Simon & Schuster in November 2006 and set off the loudest quarrel of its author's long retirement. Carter argued that Israeli control and settlement of Palestinian land had become the chief barrier to a comprehensive agreement, and insisted the word in his title described conditions in the occupied territories, not Israel, which he called a fine democracy. Alan Dershowitz and Dennis Ross challenged his handling of the Six-Day War, the United Nations resolutions and the Camp David talks. Fourteen members of a Carter Center advisory board resigned, telling him he had traded the role of broker for that of advocate, and Kenneth Stein, a historian who had advised him for years, resigned as well. Some Jewish organisations accused him of hostility to Jews, a charge other commentators rejected. He withdrew nothing. A peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, and then governor of that state, Carter won the presidency in 1976, brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, founded the Carter Center in 1982 and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002. He died at home in Plains on 29 December 2024, aged 100.