Carter to monitor Palestinian election amid hope for peace

ATLANTA — Former President Jimmy Carter will go to the Middle East this week amid high hopes for improved relations between Israelis and Palestinians, a goal he has championed since leaving the White House in 1981.

Carter will monitor the Palestinian presidential election Sunday in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with others from the Carter Center and the National Democratic Institute, a Washington-based organization that promotes democracy.

The 80-year-old former president said in an interview that he can envision a Palestinian state in his lifetime. "I'm hopeful," he said.

Though still an elusive objective, a Palestinian state would be the culmination of years of work that began when Carter, as president, brokered the Camp David Accords in 1978, which made peace between Egypt and Israel. The agreement's call for Palestinian "autonomy" has never been fully implemented.

As a former president, Carter has traveled to the Middle East several times, meeting publicly and privately with Arab and Israeli leaders. He has spoken his mind in news interviews and op-ed columns and has generally pushed and prodded others in positions of influence to work for a negotiated settlement.

Carter's Camp David record and frequent visits to the region have "put his name in the index of every important modern book on the Middle East — sometimes as a peacemaker, sometimes as a meddler, but always as a player," writes Douglas Brinkley in "The Unfinished Presidency," a book about Carter's post-presidential career. Carter's influence is such that he had a front row seat at the signing ceremony for the 1993 Oslo Accords, an agreement that called for the creation of the Palestinian Authority and limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza.

"He knows the Holy Land and Middle East better than any politician in the United States," Brinkley said in a 2002 interview.

William B. Quandt, a Middle East expert who served on Carter's National Security Council and has written a book about Camp David, said serious obstacles to lasting improvements in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute remain but that recent signs point to progress.

"Carter has done as much as anybody to keep the goal of an overarching peace settlement in mind," Quandt said.

The death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in November raised hopes of better relations between Israel and Palestinians. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called 2005 "a year of great opportunity" and said his government would remove troops and Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip this summer.