Of all the legacies of Jimmy Carter, his engagement with the Middle East might have been the most complex and consequential — and perhaps the most painfully incomplete.

At its heart is a landmark peace accord that has endured, improbably, for half a century.

A man of profound religious faith, Carter had a passionate attachment to a troubled land that he viewed, in the truest sense of the word, as holy. But as the decades passed, he became increasingly disillusioned over what he saw as a wrenching imbalance of power and its corrosive effects on two peoples.

The former president, who died Sunday at the age of 100, prompting a tsunami of tributes from around the world, could sometimes seem awkwardly out of place in the corridors of power. He was much more at home in the presence of the afflicted and downtrodden.

In the long and productive afterlife of his presidency, however, the clear-eyed prescience and innate decency Carter brought to matters like global public health and conflict resolution did not readily translate into a formula for finding peace, let alone keeping it, between Israel and its neighbors.

A prophet in the wilderness, his biographer Kai Bird called him. And prophets, Bird observed, are often unpopular.

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The groundbreaking peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, then the unquestioned leader of the Arab world, very nearly foundered at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Catoctin Mountains of Maryland, for which the accord would be named.

There, in September 1978, with Carter serving as broker, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat held a dozen days of grueling talks. In the telling of diplomat and Carter advisor Stuart Eizenstat, acrimony grew to the point that Begin was angrily packing his bags to leave — when a simple and heartfelt gesture stayed his hand.

Carter, Eizenstat wrote, individually inscribed a photo of the three leaders to each of the Israeli prime minister's eight beloved grandchildren. The implicit message: Any sacrifices offered up in that moment, in service of peace, would be intended for them.

Begin remained at Camp David. The accords were signed, and the following year Egypt recognized Israel as a sovereign state — the first of its sworn enemies to do so. The Sinai Peninsula, seized by Israel in 1967, was returned to Egypt in 1982 — the year after Carter, by then a widely mocked figure in the United States, left office.

Carter and those around him hoped that the accords would eventually pave the way to a wider regional peace, centered on a covenant between Israel and the Palestinians.

But over the years, occasional and fitful progress was halted by bouts of bloodletting that reached a brutal apogee a generation later, when Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel retaliated with an invasion of Gaza that authorities there say has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians.

"He regretted that the comprehensive deal he sought was never completed," said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle East negotiator and frequent interlocutor of Carter.

Begin and Sadat were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978 — an accolade Carter himself would receive in 2002 for his peace and human rights efforts around the world.

Miller said he believed that history would bear out the view that in the annals of Mideast peace efforts, "not a single president's negotiated agreement was ever topped" by what Carter achieved at Camp David.

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It was nearly three decades after that diplomatic triumph that Carter, with his customary deliberative calm, detonated a 288-page bombshell into the Mideast debate.

In a 2006 book titled "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," the former president drew a direct equivalence between Israel's military occupation of the West Bank and the racially based system of legal segregation and repression in South Africa.

Harking back to the searing everyday racial injustice he witnessed in his childhood days in rural Georgia, Carter wrote that Israel had created a system whereby Jewish settlers, backed by Israel's powerful military, ruled over a Palestinian majority that was systematically deprived of basic human and civil rights.

Carter's image as a kindly elder statesman, friend to world Jewry and bulwark of Israel's security took an immediate beating. American supporters of Israel recoiled, arguing that Carter had lost the objectivity that had guided him at Camp David. More than a dozen eminent members of the advisory board for the Carter Center, the nonprofit he founded with his wife, Rosalynn, stepped down in protest.

The former president was undeterred. In a 2007 interview with the nonprofit group Democracy Now!, he called the word apartheid — which means "apartness" in Afrikaans — "exactly accurate."

Palestinians "can't even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory," he said. "The Israelis never see a Palestinian, except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers. So, within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa."

According to the classic definition of apartheid, Carter added, "one side dominates the other. And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people."

Bird, his biographer, saw a through line from Carter's intense personal involvement with the Camp David talks to his decision to throw his weight behind a comparison that critics and some Israeli officials labeled the worst kind of antisemitism — and for which some conservatives are pillorying him now, after his death.

Speaking to "PBS NewsHour" the day after Carter died, Bird hailed the Camp David accords as an "extraordinary episode in personal diplomacy" but said the former president was disappointed that Begin, who died in 1992, failed to follow through on the principal expectation underpinning the pact: movement toward self-determination for the Palestinians.

Sadat was assassinated in October 1981, a scant three years after that historic parley. Regional tensions rose again, and yet another war — this one between Israel and Lebanon — broke out in 1982.

Carter consciously devoted the final decades of his life to "warning the Israelis that they were going down a road toward apartheid" if settlement-building in the West Bank continued, Bird said.

But it would be years before that view — and the word apartheid — made its way into mainstream political discourse about the Middle East.

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The Israeli government's official reaction to Carter's death was notable in the narrowness of its scope. The 40-plus years of his post-presidential era went unremarked upon, with the long-ago breakthrough in the mountains of Maryland the primary focus.

"We will always remember President Carter's role in forging the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty ... a peace treaty that has held for nearly half a century and offers hope for future generations," wrote Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog called Carter a brave leader who forged "a peace between Israel and Egypt that remains an anchor of stability throughout the Middle East and North Africa many decades later."

Egypt, too, offered a respectful if somewhat anodyne assessment. "He will be remembered as one of the world's most prominent leaders in service to humanity," President Abdel Fattah Sisi said in a statement.

Some Israeli media commentaries made note of the lingering fury over the apartheid accusation. In the Haaretz newspaper, an assessment of the former president's legacy by Alon Pinkas, Israel's onetime consul general in New York, was headlined: "Jimmy Carter was resented by Israel's leaders for holding a mirror they didn't want to look at."

The outbreak of the current war in Gaza has accelerated the shift in the vocabulary of the international legal community and human rights groups.

Early this year, Human Rights Watch concluded that Israel's treatment and "dispossession and subjugation" of nearly 5 million Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip represent "deprivations ... so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution."

Miller, now a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said that Carter was stunned by the depth of resentment from many American Jews over his criticism of Israel, and that the quarrel left lasting wounds.

"Carter never got over the feeling of betrayal and abandonment by the Jewish community" that he felt he had helped with the Camp David accords but for whom he had "become a bogeyman," Miller said.

Still, the former president remained steadfast in his judgment.

"This is Jimmy Carter," biographer Bird said in the PBS interview. "He just was relentless."

In his native Georgia and in the U.S. capital, much of the next week is expected to be filled with ceremonial homage to Carter.

The five living presidents who succeeded him, whose own Mideast peace efforts sometimes bore brief fruit but more often foundered, have all paid public tribute to him, in their own ways.

Carter's body will lie in state next Tuesday and Wednesday in the Capitol Rotunda. His funeral ceremony at the National Cathedral will be held the following day — which President Biden has decreed a national day of mourning — followed by a private interment in his Georgia hometown, Plains.

Eulogies will probably dwell on a humble peanut farmer turned president, a tireless humanitarian, a striving and sometimes flawed man.

And on what was perhaps his most difficult role, with the most elusive of prizes — that of peacemaker.

King and Wilkinson are both former Los Angeles Times bureau chiefs in Jerusalem.

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