Former US president Jimmy Carter, who passed away on Sunday at his home in Plains, Georgia, was a true friend of Palestine. Despite a decidedly checkered presidency on issues ranging from human rights abroad to austerity at home, he will be remembered as one of the first and most distinguished international observers to foresee Israel’s apartheid system in Palestine.

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.

According to Amnesty, “Despite the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, more than 1,800 Israeli military orders continue to control and restrict all aspects of the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank: their livelihoods, status, movement, political activism, detention and prosecution, and access to natural resources.”

Carter’s legacy in the Middle East was one of tragic paradox. Indeed, it was no coincidence that the man who orchestrated the Camp David Accords could also foresee the perils of apartheid in Palestine. The original sin of Camp David was such that instead of paving the way for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, it made peace with the Palestinians all the more dispensable. It both alienated Palestinians and emboldened Israel, rendering the perspective of Palestinian independence a distant mirage. During the administration of Menachem Begin, the number of Israeli settlements more than tripled, and the number of Israeli settlers increased more than fivefold. Settlements have expanded under every subsequent Israeli government over the past five decades, eating steadily into Palestinian dreams of independence.

Today there are over half a million settlers in the West Bank, living in over 140 Jewish settlements, in addition to some 140 illegal outposts, which have been built over the past three decades without government approval and are considered illegal even under Israeli law. In East Jerusalem, over 340,000 Jewish settlers live in fourteen illegal settlements built by the Israeli authorities on private lands and private homes taken over from Palestinians under discriminatory and unlawful schemes. This puts the total settler population well above 700,000 settlers. Together, the settler population represents 12 percent of Jews living in Israel today.

Meanwhile, some 3.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, mostly in segregated cantons behind Israel’s “apartheid wall” and newly constructed “Apartheid Road,” and in towns and cities penned between Jewish settlement blocks and behind a network of segregated roads, separation walls, security barriers, and military installations. These measures are meant not merely to segregate Palestinians, but to ultimately dispossess them by means of land annexation and forced displacement.

For Palestinians living there, apartheid signifies not merely ethnic segregation, but, as I have written elsewhere, the inhumanity of life under occupation: “the beatings, shootings, killings, assassinations, lynchings, curfews, military checkpoints, house demolitions, forced evictions and deportations, forceful separations, forced disappearances, uprooting of trees, mass arrests, extended imprisonments, and detentions without trial.”

In total, about 6.8 million Jewish Israelis occupy over 85 percent of historic Palestine, while nearly seven million Palestinians are confined to the remaining portion in apartheid-like conditions, either under perpetual total siege in Gaza, under military occupation in the West Bank, in a stateless limbo in Jerusalem, or as second-class citizens in Israel.

Carter soon realized that Camp David was an incomplete peace. Thirty years after leaving office, he was ready to admit that it was a mistake to abandon the Palestinians at Camp David. As he lamented of late: “On balance, my life has been a constant stream of blessings rather than disappointments and failures and tragedies. I wish I had been re-elected. I think I could have kept our country at peace. I think I could have consolidated what we achieved at Camp David with a treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. But I left office, and a lot of things changed.”

Haunted by Camp David’s legacy, Carter reemerged as a champion of Palestinian independence and would remain for years a constant thorn in Israel’s side. In 2016, he called on President Barack Obama to grant formal US diplomatic recognition to the state of Palestine before the end of his term, which Carter believed would inspire other countries to follow suit, thus paving the way for full Palestinian membership in the United Nations.

Carter believed that Palestinian statehood was an inalienable right of the Palestinian people and a prelude to historical justice. “And that is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience and dedication that the task requires,” Carter wrote. He constantly urged the United States not to veto the Security Council vote for Palestinian statehood.

In his final reckoning, the former president came to see the United States as a warlike force in the world. Nearly forty years after leaving office, he described the United States as the “most warlike nation in the history of the world” — a fact so tragically manifested today in the US complicity in Israel’s apartheid regime and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, not to mention the genocide in Gaza.

This complicity is tied to the Israel lobby’s unchallenged sway over US politics, which Carter perceptively foresaw. “AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is not dedicated to peace,” he told Amy Goodman in 2007. “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.” (Carter was in AIPAC’s crosshairs since he published that book, despite the fact that fifteen former Israeli leaders have called Israel’s occupation of the West Bank an apartheid.)

Apartheid regimes are untenable and unsustainable, however long they linger. The South African anti-apartheid movement evolved over three decades, building on massive popular and grassroots resistance, international solidarity, boycott movements, and sanction campaigns — perhaps an inspiring precursor of what we’re witnessing in Palestine today. (It’s no surprise that Israel supported the apartheid regime in South Africa for decades.)

Jimmy Carter was a champion of peace who also foresaw the perils of apartheid in Palestine. He understood that Israel cannot pursue piecemeal and unilateral peace treaties with Arab states on one hand while it continues to dispossess and ethnically cleanse Palestinians on the other.