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JIMMY CARTER WAS RIGHT ABOUT ISRAEL’S APARTHEID  
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Seraj Assi
December 30, 2024
Jacobin
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_ No US president has ever been willing to call the system imposed by
Israel on the Palestinians what it is: apartheid. Except Jimmy Carter.
Jimmy Carter was a champion of peace who also foresaw the perils of
apartheid in Palestine. _

In 2006, Jimmy Carter wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, published
by Simon & Schuster, Simon & Schuster

 

Former US president Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Sunday at his
home in Plains, Georgia, was a true friend of Palestine. Despite a
decidedly checkered
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on issues ranging from human rights abroad
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he will be remembered as one of the first and most distinguished
international observers to foresee Israel’s apartheid system in
Palestine.

In 2006, Carter published _Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid_, in which
he equated Israel’s occupation in the West Bank to the apartheid
system of South Africa. Carter defined apartheid as the “forced
separation of two peoples in the same territory with one of the groups
dominating or controlling the other.” What follows, he concluded, is
that Israel was creating a “system of apartheid” where a minority
of Israeli settlers were ruling over a Palestinian majority who are
deprived of basic human and civil rights.

Carter went further. In an interview with MSNBC, he called Israel’s
rule in the West Bank “a horrendous example of apartheid” and
“one of the worst examples of human right deprivations that I
know.” In fact, Carter went on to warn
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Israel’s apartheid system was even worse than South Africa. As he
later told CBS: “When Israel does occupy this territory deep within
the West Bank, and connects the 200 or so settlements with each other,
with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road,
or in many cases even crossing the road, this perpetrates even worse
instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South
Africa.”

Carter’s warnings proved perceptive. In recent years, the grim
reality of Israeli apartheid has been depicted in shocking detail by a
host of damning international reports, from Amnesty
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to Human Rights Watch. By their account, Israel has created a deeply
entrenched system of ethnic segregation where Palestinians and Israeli
Jews in the West Bank live under a two-tiered legal system, which
grants settlers special status
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depriving Palestinians of basic human rights. While Jewish settlers
enjoy all the civic privileges and legal protections afforded by the
Israeli law — including Israeli citizenship, the right to vote in
Israeli elections, and access to Israel’s civilian courts —
Palestinians living effectively under Israeli military rule are
deprived of all the legal rights and protections afforded to settlers.

According to Amnesty, “Despite the establishment of the Palestinian
Authority, more than 1,800 Israeli military orders continue to control
and restrict all aspects of the lives of Palestinians in the West
Bank: their livelihoods, status, movement, political activism,
detention and prosecution, and access to natural resources.”

 

Carter’s legacy in the Middle East was one of tragic paradox.
Indeed, it was no coincidence that the man who orchestrated the Camp
David Accords could also foresee the perils of apartheid in Palestine.
The original sin of Camp David was such that instead of paving the way
for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, it made peace with the
Palestinians all the more dispensable. It both alienated Palestinians
and emboldened Israel, rendering the perspective of Palestinian
independence a distant mirage. During the administration of Menachem
Begin, the number of Israeli settlements more than tripled, and the
number of Israeli settlers increased more than fivefold. Settlements
have expanded under every subsequent Israeli government over the past
five decades, eating steadily into Palestinian dreams of independence.

Today there are over half a million settlers in the West Bank, living
in over 140 Jewish settlements, in addition to some 140 illegal
outposts, which have been built over the past three decades without
government approval and are considered illegal even under Israeli law.
In East Jerusalem, over 340,000 Jewish settlers live in fourteen
illegal settlements built by the Israeli authorities on private lands
and private homes taken over from Palestinians under discriminatory
and unlawful schemes. This puts the total settler population well
above 700,000 settlers. Together, the settler population represents 12
percent of Jews living in Israel today.

Meanwhile, some 3.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and
East Jerusalem, mostly in segregated cantons behind Israel’s
“apartheid wall” and newly constructed “Apartheid Road
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and in towns and cities penned between Jewish settlement blocks and
behind a network of segregated roads, separation walls, security
barriers, and military installations. These measures are meant not
merely to segregate Palestinians, but to
ultimately _dispossess_ them by means of land annexation and forced
displacement.

For Palestinians living there, apartheid signifies not merely ethnic
segregation, but, as I have written elsewhere
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the inhumanity of life under occupation: “the beatings, shootings,
killings, assassinations, lynchings, curfews, military checkpoints,
house demolitions, forced evictions and deportations, forceful
separations, forced disappearances, uprooting of trees, mass arrests,
extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial.”

In total, about 6.8 million Jewish Israelis occupy over 85 percent of
historic Palestine, while nearly seven million Palestinians are
confined to the remaining portion in apartheid-like conditions, either
under perpetual total siege in Gaza, under military occupation in the
West Bank, in a stateless limbo in Jerusalem, or as second-class
citizens in Israel.

 

Carter soon realized that Camp David was an incomplete peace. Thirty
years after leaving office, he was ready to admit that it was a
mistake to abandon the Palestinians at Camp David. As he lamented
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late: “On balance, my life has been a constant stream of blessings
rather than disappointments and failures and tragedies. I wish I had
been re-elected. I think I could have kept our country at peace. I
think I could have consolidated what we achieved at Camp David with a
treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. But I left office, and a
lot of things changed.”

Haunted by Camp David’s legacy, Carter reemerged as a champion of
Palestinian independence and would remain for years a constant thorn
in Israel’s side. In 2016, he called on
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Barack Obama to grant formal US diplomatic recognition to the state of
Palestine before the end of his term, which Carter believed would
inspire other countries to follow suit, thus paving the way for full
Palestinian membership in the United Nations.

Carter believed that Palestinian statehood was an inalienable right of
the Palestinian people and a prelude to historical justice. “And
that is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the
patience and dedication that the task requires,” Carter wrote
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He constantly urged the United States not to veto the Security Council
vote for Palestinian statehood.

Jimmy Carter Interviewed On Democracy Now 
September 10 2007 Broadcast

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Watch here [[link removed]]  

 

In his final reckoning, the former president came to see the United
States as a warlike force in the world. Nearly forty years after
leaving office, he described
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United States as the “most warlike nation in the history of the
world” — a fact so tragically manifested today in the US
complicity in Israel’s apartheid regime and ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians, not to mention the genocide in Gaza.

This complicity is tied to the Israel lobby’s unchallenged sway over
US politics, which Carter perceptively foresaw. “AIPAC [the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee] is not dedicated to peace,”
he told
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Goodman in 2007. “They’re dedicated to inducing the maximum
support in America, in the White House, in the Congress, and in the
public media, for whatever policies the Israeli government has at a
particular time.” (Carter was in AIPAC’s crosshairs since he
published that book, despite the fact that fifteen former Israeli
leaders [[link removed]] have called
Israel’s occupation of the West Bank an apartheid.)

 

Apartheid regimes are untenable and unsustainable, however long they
linger. The South African anti-apartheid movement evolved over three
decades, building on massive popular and grassroots resistance,
international solidarity, boycott movements, and sanction campaigns
— perhaps an inspiring precursor of what we’re witnessing in
Palestine today. (It’s no surprise that Israel supported
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apartheid regime in South Africa for decades.)

Jimmy Carter was a champion of peace who also foresaw the perils of
apartheid in Palestine. He understood that Israel cannot pursue
piecemeal and unilateral peace treaties with Arab states on one hand
while it continues to dispossess and ethnically cleanse Palestinians
on the other.

_[SERAJ ASSI is a Palestinian writer living in Washington, DC, and the
author, most recently, of My Life As An Alien
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Press).]_

* Jimmy Carter
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* Palestine
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* Palestinians
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* Israel-Palestine
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* Gaza
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* West Bank
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* apartheid
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* Israeli Occupation
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* Occupied Territories
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* Israel and Palestine
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* U.S.-Israel relations
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* U.S-Palestine Relations
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* Genocide
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* War and Imperialism
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