Sixteen years earlier, Berman had been the leader of 15 board members who had resigned in protest from the Carter Centre, the international NGO that the US president had formed after leaving office. Like many other Jewish-Americans, Berman had been infuriated by Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, and he was far from convinced by Carter’s explanation that, while he was not saying that Israel was already an apartheid state, it was moving in that direction because of its occupation of Palestinian territory.
Berman had always been relatively liberal, but his story still illustrates the extent to which Carter was ahead of his time, using language about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians that was far less common then than it is now.
After all, his greatest foreign policy achievement was his mediation which secured the ground-breaking, historic and still surviving Egypt-Israel treaty in 1979, which in Berman’s own words had “spared thousands of lives on the Israeli-Egyptian border” and saved “hundreds of billions of dollars in military costs”.
Carter had wanted to do more, of course, by securing a lasting solution to the core Middle East conflict. But unlike the many other US presidents who had failed to do that in office, Carter devoted himself in retirement – beside his pursuit of many other causes like the reduction of famine and disease in Africa – to finding the just peace between Israelis and Palestinians that looks so distant today.
Carter was characteristically robust in calling for an end to the Israel-Egypt blockade, which he described as treating Gaza’s inhabitants as “more like animals than human beings” and condemning the recent military offensive in Gaza, as well as the firing of rockets by militants from the Strip.
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Read MoreHamas had indicated that it would accept a Palestinian state on 1967 borders if it was backed in a referendum, and this was a high point for the more political elements in Hamas seeking international recognition.
Carter remained highly critical of Israel’s present prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for having “no intention at all for a two-state solution”. And he was scathing about Donald Trump’s plan in his first term for a “Deal of the Century”, saying he saw little or no hope of it bringing “justice for the Palestinians”.
Meanwhile, within a week of his own 2015 letter to Carter, Steve Berman received a handwritten note from the ex-president saying he had no need to apologise. His Forward article was headlined: “I was wrong about Israel. I apologised. Then President Carter gave me a lesson in grace.”
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