Carter summoned Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Camp David to make peace, not apartheid, in the Middle East. But the Israeli president broke his promise to freeze settlements.
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Finally, in 2006 Carter published a book on the conflict. He gave it the provocative title, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. His editor at Simon & Schuster, Alice Mayhew, reportedly tried to talk him out of using the incendiary word “apartheid.” So too did Stu Eizenstat and other former aides. One longtime aide at the Carter Center, Ken Stein, resigned in protest.
Carter wanted to provoke. The title was certainly provocative, but the word apartheid was there in the title as a warning—a clear observation that if Israel did not achieve peace with the Palestinians, then the growing facts on the ground, the increasing number of settlements in the West Bank, would rule out forever a two-state solution. Notably, Carter’s text in the book made no argument that Israel was already an apartheid state.
Israel’s friends were outraged, and Carter made himself even more of a pariah in the Jewish American community. Some accused him of antisemitism. Carter tried to explain that he had not meant to offend. But he defended his book, which leapt onto the bestseller lists and managed to sell an extraordinary 275,000 copies in hardcover.
That was 19 years ago. Of course, since then, things in that dangerous neighborhood have become unimaginably worse. Some Palestinians cheered as Hamas committed war crimes, killing some 1200 Israelis on October 7, 2023. And since then, Bibi Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for committing war crimes in Gaza, killing, so far, some 45,000 Palestinians, 90 percent of whom were civilians, thousands of them completely innocent children.
Carter’s book has proved prescient. He was always a prophet, speaking uncomfortable hard truths, but now his voice is not so lonely. Sadly, he was right about the settlements in 1978—and right about them in 2006. There are now more than 700,000 Jewish Israeli settlers in the West Bank, a territory crisscrossed by “Israeli only” roads and a maze of civil and legal constraints on the Palestinian population that make it impossible to pursue a normal life.
I would argue that if the international community could muster
More probably, Israel will proclaim its annexation, first of the major settlements, and gradually, of the entire West Bank. Palestinians will be pushed to leave. It is all a very bleak prospect.
This is why Camp David became Jimmy Carter’s deepest regret. He wanted more for Israel than for it to be continuously at war. He wanted peace, not apartheid.
