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. Not all of them have been as restrained as Abe Foxman, the director of the Anti-Defamation League, who complains of Carter’s ‘bias’ but avoids tossing the epithet ‘anti-Semite’ at the
president who, nearly three decades ago, brokered the Camp David accord, which did more to secure Israel’s place and legitimacy in the region than all the diplomacy that preceded or followed it.