Palestinians planted a grove of 250 trees in the northern Samaria city of Tulkarem on Sunday in memory of the late US President Jimmy Carter. The Palestinian Farmers Union oversaw the project in collaboration with US-based nonprofit Treedom for Palestine.

“I think planting olive trees that live at least 100 years old like him is a very suitable way to honor his life and his legacy,” said George Zeidan, the Carter Center’s Director in Israel and Palestine.

The newly planted 2.5-acre grove was named the “Freedom Farm.”

Carter, who died last month at the age of 100, was a member of the Democratic Party and served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. As president, he oversaw the Nicaraguan Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Iranian Revolution, which resulted in the Iran hostage crisis and the 1979 oil crisis. 

He brokered the Camp David peace accords between Israel and Egypt in 1978, marking the first peace agreement between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors. 

Due to the agreement, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin received the shared 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. The agreement, which had Israel relinquish the Sinai Peninsula it had captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, was condemned by the United Nations.

Carter ran for reelection in 1980 but lost in a landslide to Ronal Reagan. 

In his later years, Carter was highly critical of Israel. In his book, published in 2006, he accused Israel of apartheid “worse than South Africa’s” and advocated for Israel withdrawing from the “occupied territories.”He was later forced to apologize for wording in the book that suggested that Palestinian suicide terror attacks were justified as a political tool. In his 2010 book We Can Have Peace in the Holy Land, Carter cites Israel’s unwillingness to withdraw from the “occupied Palestinian territories” and “settlement expansion” as the primary obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

In an article he co-wrote with former Irish president Mary Robinson in an issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Carter called on the West to recognize the U.S.-designated terrorist group Hamas as a legitimate “political actor” that represents the bulk of the Palestinian population. The article blames Israel for the hostilities, claiming that rejecting a Hamas government in Gaza was the root cause. 

He also criticized the IDF incursion into Gaza following massive rocket attacks targeting Israeli cities and the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers.

“There is no humane or legal justification for the way the Israeli Defense Forces are conducting this war,” Carter wrote.