Jimmy Carter and Apartheid

Volume 54, Number 5 · March 29, 2007

Jimmy Carter and Apartheid
By Joseph Lelyveld
Perhaps an intrepid researcher will one day go through the many Internet pages that make assertions pro and con on the question of whether Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories can properly be assessed as "apartheid." Then we may be in a position to tell whether the first polemicist to sling the term in the context of the West Bank was a foreigner, a Palestinian, or, just possibly, an Israeli. Suffice it to say, it wasn't Jimmy Carter, whose recent book, with its unpunctuated title Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has been high on the best-seller lists for nearly three months despite—maybe, in part, because of—the wrath his use of the term has provoked among Israel's supporters.