Palestine Peace Not Apartheid. The title was Jimmy Carter’s idea. Peace talks were nonexistent, Israel showed no sign of ending its control over the lives of millions of Palestinians, and the United States was not doing anything to stop it. Carter wanted to be provocative. He succeeded.

The well-organized backlash to Carter’s 2006 book was captured by an ad in the New York Times from the Anti-Defamation League that declared: “There’s only one honest thing about President Carter’s new book. The criticism.” Included below were denunciations from Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and DNC Chairman Howard Dean. Carter, who’d brought together Israel and Egypt at Camp David in 1978 and won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, said he was being called a bigot and an antisemite for the first time in his life.

Carter saw where Israel was headed with its refusal to countenance Palestinian statehood, and correctly warned it would end tragically for both sides. In response, the American mainstream treated him as a crank at best and an antisemite at worst. With Palestinians now suffering the worst violence in their history, which Amnesty International recently concluded constitutes genocide, it is more important than ever to recognize the truth of Carter’s claim that peace would only come when Israel—likely under pressure from the United States—abandoned its efforts to deprive Palestinians of sovereignty in their homeland.