Jimmy Carter Was Right About Israel’s Apartheid

No US president has ever been willing to call the system imposed by Israel on the Palestinians what it is: apartheid. Except Jimmy Carter.

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.”

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 International 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 while 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.”