A conversation with Jimmy Carter, the 39h president of the United States, and Amy Goodman from DemocracyNow in September 2007.

AMY GOODMAN: President Carter, I wanted to switch gears to talk about the raging controversy over your book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.

JIMMY CARTER: I didn’t know it was still raging, but that’s interesting.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it raged for a while, and now the book is coming out on paperback with a new afterword. And you dealt with that, you talked about it being perhaps the most controversial thing that you’ve done, maybe, to your surprise. So, start with the title. Talk about the message you’re trying to put out with this book.

JIMMY CARTER: Well, the message is very clear. It deals with Palestine, not inside Israel itself, just the Palestinian Occupied Territories. And the second word is “peace.” I describe in this book the efforts for peace so far and my formula, which I think is very reasonable, for bringing peace to Israel and to Israel’s neighbors. And I repeat that over and over with a strong condemnation of any kind of terrorism that afflicts innocent people by the actions of either the Palestinians or the Israelis.

And the word “apartheid” is exactly accurate. You know, this is an area that’s occupied by two powers. They are now completely separated. Palestinians can’t even ride on the same roads that the Israelis have created or built in Palestinian territory. The Israelis never see a Palestinian, except the Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians never see an Israeli, except at a distance, except the Israeli soldiers. So within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way. And the other thing is, the other definition of “apartheid” is, one side dominates the other. And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people.

AMY GOODMAN: Why don’t Americans know what you have seen?

JIMMY CARTER: Americans don’t want to know and many Israelis don’t want to know what is going on inside Palestine. It’s a terrible human rights persecution that far transcends what any outsider would imagine. And there are powerful political forces in America that prevent any objective analysis of the problem in the holy land. I think it’s accurate to say that not a single member of Congress with whom I’m familiar would possibly speak out and call for Israel to withdraw to their legal boundaries or to publicize the plight of the Palestinians or even to call publicly and repeatedly for good faith peace talks. There hasn’t been a day of peace talks now in more than seven years. So this is a taboo subject. And I would say that if any member of Congress did speak out, as I’ve just described, they would probably not be back in the Congress the next term.

AMY GOODMAN: Who are these forces that you’re talking about?

JIMMY CARTER: Well, there’s an inherent commitment in America, which I share as a Christian, of a deep commitment to make sure that Israel is safe and that Israel is free and that they can seek for peace. So there’s a strong inclination for all of us to support Israel’s continued existence in peace. And that is added onto by the very effective work of the American Israeli group called AIPAC, which is performing its completely legitimate task of convincing Americans to support the policies of the Israeli government. And AIPAC is not dedicated to peace. 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. And they’re extremely effective.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you agree with Walt and Mearsheimer, their new book, The Israel Lobby, about the power of AIPAC determining U.S. foreign policy?

JIMMY CARTER: I have to say I haven’t read the book. I have read stories about it. I don’t really know about the details of it, but I do know that AIPAC is very powerful, and completely legitimate. I’m not complaining, because that’s their purpose in life. And AIPAC, I think, was organized in the distant past, I think, when Eisenhower was president. And they’ve grown in influence, and, in some ways, they have to be admired.

AMY GOODMAN: Did they influence you as president?

JIMMY CARTER: Not really, because I was immune from those pressures. When I was elected president, you know, I came out of nowhere. Nobody thought I was going to win until the last minute. And so, I wasn’t obligated to them. And I worked assiduously almost every day of my term as president to bring peace to Israel and also peace to Israel’s neighbors. And we negotiated a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, not a word of which has ever been violated. So I don’t think there was any doubt that my commitment then and now was to see Israel have peace, living in harmony with its neighbors, and justice, as well, and peace for Israel’s neighbors.

…

So we could see the terrible plight of the Palestinians, the fact that Israel has over 200 settlements on Palestinian territory, all fortified, that Israel has over 500 checkpoints in Palestine, where the Palestinians can’t move from one place to another, and where there’s a wall being built, completely surrounding Gaza, completely surrounding Bethlehem and other substantial-sized cities, deeply intruding into Palestinian territory and encompassing more and more land for the Israelis to take away from Palestine. And the fact is that the West Bank is a tiny little place that was carved out for the Palestinians, just 22 percent of the total land. But the problem is that Israel wants to take that 22 percent and control it. And major highways are built from one Israeli settlement to another and into Jerusalem, from which many — on many of those highways, the Palestinians can’t even ride or sometimes can’t even cross the highways. So this is what’s happening inside Palestine, perpetrated by the Israelis. And this is a major obstacle to having what I want and what most Israelis want, by an overwhelming majority, and that is peace.

MY GOODMAN: At this conference, you describe the wall as worse than the Berlin Wall.

JIMMY CARTER: Oh, it’s much worse. The Berlin Wall was built by the communists on the communist side of the border between East and West Germany, as you know. This wall is built on Palestinian land, and it’s designed not for security — that’s an ancillary benefit — but it goes deep within the West Bank just to carve out more and more land for the Israelis to occupy in Palestine.

AMY GOODMAN: What is the point of the wall?

JIMMY CARTER: The wall was built — was planned originally by Yitzhak Rabin when he was prime minister — he’s the one that negotiated the Oslo Agreement, a peace agreement — to be built along the border, the 1967 border between Israel and Palestine. And the International World Court and I and others approved completely. There’s nothing wrong with that. That would have been like the Berlin Wall. But then Rabin was assassinated, and his successors — Netanyahu, Sharon and others — decided: Let’s move the wall from the Israeli border to intrude deeply within Palestine to carve out some of that precious land for the Israeli settlers to occupy.

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Notes:

https://www.democracynow.org/2007/9/10/fmr_president_jimmy_carter_on_palestine