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.