Jimmy Carter Was Right About Israel’s Apartheid

By Seraj Assi, Jacobin

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 presidency on issues ranging from human rights abroad to austerity at home, 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 that 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.”