Former President and Human Rights Champion Jimmy Carter Dies at 100

Former President Jimmy Carter, who served just four years in office and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his decades of work promoting human rights and international peace, died on Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia at the age of 100.

His death was confirmed by his son and came close to two years after the Carter Center announced that the former president had stopped medical treatment for health conditions and was entering hospice care.

Rights advocates have credited Carter for his championing of the rights of marginalized people including Palestinians, even as the U.S. political establishment remains overwhelmingly supportive of Israel's violent policies in Palestine.

"He was our greatest ex-president and a very good president despite GOP efforts to tarnish him," said James Zogby, founder of the Arab American Institute. "He was a peacemaker and a human rights champion. A humble man. He taught us how to live with principles and how to die with grace."

During his term, Carter helped to broker peace between Israel and Egypt, finalized a treaty that returned control of the Panama Canal to Panama, and signed an agreement with the Soviet Union to limit strategic weapons. But conservatives attacked him for presiding over a period of high unemployment and inflation, the Iran hostage crisis, and an energy crisis in which the price of oil tripled.

Carter was credited with being ahead of his time regarding environmental concerns—installing solar water heater panels on the White House that were later removed by his Republican successor.

"A generation from now,” he said at a televised event when the panels were installed, "this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people."

He lost his reelection campaign to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980. As the Republican president set about promoting trickle-down economics, with lasting effects on corporate power and income inequality in the U.S., Carter turned his attention to building affordable housing with Habitat for Humanity and promoting human rights and peacemaking around the world.

With his wife Rosalynn—who died in November 2023—Carter established the Carter Center in the early 1980s. The organization's health programs have been credited with helping to cure and control diseases including river blindness, trachoma, and Guinea worm disease in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts," including his leadership during the painstaking negotiations that ended decades of conflict between Egypt and Israel in 1978. In his acceptance speech, Carter warned against the invasion of Iraq.

He published the book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in 2006, comparing Israel's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid in South Africa. The book was treated as controversial, but he vehemently defended its central argument.

"The word 'apartheid' is exactly accurate," he told Democracy Now! "Palestinians can't even ride on the same roads that Israelis have created in Palestinian territory... The Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people."

In October 2023, the Carter Center issued a statement saying there was "no military solution" to the conflict between Hamas and Israel, and demanded a cease-fire.

Carter also distinguished himself among former presidents by speaking out against the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, saying the U.S. had become an "oligarchy with unlimited political bribery."

"My father was a hero, not only to me but to everyone who believes in peace, human rights, and unselfish love," said Chip Carter, the former president's son. "My brothers, sister, and I shared him with the rest of the world through these common beliefs. The world is our family because of the way he brought people together, and we thank you for honoring his memory by continuing to live these shared beliefs."