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Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome former President Jimmy Carter back to this program. Since leaving office in 1981, he has been a tireless advocate for peace around the world and, in 2002 was, of course, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He's also a perennial 'New York Times' best-selling author. His latest book is his twenty-first. It's called 'Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.' Of course, unless you're living under a rock, you know that already, (laugh) because it's been talked about so much in the news. Mr. President, nice to have you back.

Jimmy Carter: Nice to be with you, Tavis, thank you.

Tavis: Good to see you again. Let me start, if I might - there's so much to get to with regard to what you have said and what others have said about what you said (laugh) in the text. Let me get to that in just a second. I'll put this aside for the moment. There are a couple of items in the news today I wanna get your thoughts about first, if you don't mind. I bring out my little handy blue card, 'cause I wanna get this quote right.

First of all, Kofi Annan today earlier gave his farewell speech as secretary-general of the United Nations. He had this to say, I wanna get your thoughts on it if I might right quick. 'No state can make its own actions legitimate in the eyes of others. When power, especially military force, is used, the world will consider it legitimate only when conceived, when convinced (rather) that it is being used for the right purpose. For broadly-shared aims in accordance with broadly-accepted norms.' I wonder what state, what country Mr. Annan was talking about, Mr. Carter?

Carter: (Laugh) Well, I haven't talked to Kofi; not this week. But it's obvious to me that he's talking about the United States, and he has a right to say what he wants. It's kind of a surprising speech to make going away as secretary-general. I understand he made it at the Harry Truman Center. And he was contrasting, just from the news reports that I've seen, the policies of Harry Truman and other presidents with what has happened in the last five or six years.

Well, we've had a radical departure from what has been done in previous administrations. Including George Bush Senior and Ronald Reagan and, and Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman and others. And that is the initiation of a policy called 'preemptive war.' In the past, we've gone to war only when our own security was directly threatened. And we've always tried to go to war, if necessary, in harmony with as many other countries as we could. Which George Bush Sr. did in the earlier Iraq War. So I presume that's what Kofi is referring to.

Tavis: What do you make of the standing, or the lack thereof, of the U.S. in the world community these days?

Carter: Well, unfortunately, we've reached the bottom, at least in my lifetime, of public-supported friendship and esteem and trust in many nations of the world. When I was in office, for instance, our best friends in the Arab world were, a number of them, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, I would say. I saw a Pew poll recently, one of the most respected poll firms in international affairs; they show that less than five percent of the people in Egypt and Jordan look with favor on the United States, which is very disturbing, and I hope it'll change.

And that's one remote reason that I wrote this book, because I think that the lack of attention to the possibility of bringing peace to Israel and peace to the Palestinians in the last six years has been one of the causes of disturbance. People don't believe that we care about peace in general. They don't believe that we care about the plight of the Palestinians.

Tavis: All right, to the book we go. You said, in advance of the publishing of the book, or along with the publishing of the book, you said that you wanted to jumpstart - I'm paraphrasing here - you wanted to jumpstart a conversation about this.

Carter: Exactly.

Tavis: You wanted to be, and knew you were in fact being, somewhat provocative with what you have titled the book and some of the things you argue in the book. Let me ask you before we get into the text whether or not at this point, as you sit here talking to me, it was worth it? And I raise that only because there seems to be more talk about what Jimmy Carter said than about the lack of peace in the Middle East. So is the strategy working the way you wanted it to?

Carter: Well, I think it has precipitated discussion.

Tavis: That's an understatement.

Carter: Which has been absent in this country. It would be impossible for, for instance, a member of the Congress to say publicly, 'I want to take a balanced point of view between the Israelis and the Palestinians.' Or to say, 'I really believe that Israel should withdraw to its legal borders and obey international law.' Or for a Congress member to say, 'I think we ought to pay attention to the violation of human rights among the Palestinians.'

They probably wouldn't get re-elected. And it's not only politicians, Tavis, it's also the major news media in this country. They only present the Israeli side of every issue. There's some exceptions. And I would say that the exceptions are obviously on television, radio. But you look at 'The New York Times,' you look at 'The Wall Street Journal' and, and so forth, there's no really discussion.

And what grieves me is that, in Israel, there is an intense discussion every day, constant arguments and debates about the policies of Israel in occupied territories. And for the last 30 years, I have paid very close attention to all the polls done in the Mideast. And every poll in the last 30 years has shown that a majority of Israelis are in favor of withdrawing from Palestinian territory in exchange for peace. But there's a small minority who now control the government in Israel that prefer land of the Palestinians to any sort of peace process.

Tavis: So whether you agree or disagree, like or loathe President Jimmy Carter, he is a Nobel Peace Laureate. When I hear, see, watch President Carter get slammed against the wall for trying to have a balanced conversation about this, if I were in fact a leader, or thought about wanting to be a leader, why in the heck would I take up this conversation if I see how they're treating you?

Carter: Well, I don't feel abused. This is not a...

Tavis: Your friends are walking away from you.

Carter: I don't know of any.

Tavis: This one friend.

Carter: Well...

Tavis: Mr. Stein.

Carter: Mr. Stein worked with me when we first started the Carter Center. And I made some trips to the Mideast during the administration of President Reagan. And I took Ken Stein with me. He was an expert on history of the Mideast, and he was very beneficial. Ken and the Carter Center I separated 13 years ago, and we haven't had any relationship since then, except I teach in his class at Emory every now and then.

And in order to honor Professor Stein, because he did good work for us, I let him keep the honorary title of 'Fellow' in the Carter Center. He hasn't been active at all in the Carter Center. And I thought he appreciated it 'cause it adds another line to his bio, and makes him - he appreciated it. So, what he resigned from was nothing. He hasn't been part of the Carter Center since then.

And the other, I noticed in the 'L.A. Times' today that they quote John Conyers, whom I really admire - he's gonna be the new Judiciary chairman - and he commented about my book. But all the comments quoted from him were before my book was published. I haven't seen any - I haven't lost any friends about what's in the book.

Tavis: Let me - I wanna come back to the John Conyers ad, we're gonna put it on the screen here in just a second, when I call for it. I wanna come back to that in two seconds. Let me go back; let me ask you one quick follow-up to the question I asked a moment ago.

Now, I say this respectfully. If you see President Carter get jumped on by the Israeli lobby, why, even if I care deeply and richly about peace in the Middle East, if you, a Nobel Peace Laureate, can't raise a balanced conversation about this, how do you get the rest of us to engage in earnest dialogue?

Carter: Well, the week before last, I went on a book tour, mostly on the East Coast. Last week, I was teaching at Emory University; I'm a professor there. And I had five book signings. I guess they averaged more than a thousand people each time. And the response was overwhelmingly positive. And in all of that time, I remember one person came and said something very critical of me across the table.

She didn't buy a book, but she came, one out of 5,000 people. But I'm not saying that's a ratio of people that support me, but it's very disturbing to folks to espouse a cause for years, and have nobody dispute what you claim about that cause, and all of a sudden there is a question about your position. And some people have reacted, I think, in a personal way against me, because my top goal in international affairs for the last 30 years of my life, as a president and as head of the Carter Center, has been to bring peace to Israel. And that's still my top goal.

Tavis: Let me ask you, to your point now, whether or not you're taking any of this personally. How are you internalizing or viewing this?

Carter: Well, I really haven't seen tangible results of lost friendship yet that would cause me concern. And the fact that some of the organizations are speaking out against a book, most of them haven't read it; I just accommodate that with complete equanimity. It doesn't disturb me. And some of the major newspapers have had the book reviews written, as signed at the bottom, by the executive director of the American Jewish community in Atlanta, for instance, and so forth.

And so I understand that. And because there's a great deal of sensitivity in this country - if there wasn't that sensitivity, we would have had open and honest debates. We might have even had peace in the Middle East now. So, I hope it will continue to stimulate discussion, debate, and - 'cause I'm willing to debate with anybody after they read the book. But there's nothing wrong with that book.

The book is absolutely true, and it tells about the horrible, almost unbelievable abuse of Palestinians in their own land, where the land has been occupied, confiscated, and then colonized by the occupying powers. And the Palestinians have been forced out of their homes, out of their land, off the hilltops, out of their - out of their pastures and fields. And then the Israelis have built settlements, over 200 settlements still in the West Bank.

They connect the settlements with roads, from one settlement to another, for the convenience of the settlers, and then major roads going into Jerusalem. In most cases, the Palestinians cannot even use those roads. And they can't cross them. They can't cross the roads to get to their own pastures or fields. And then in addition to that, there's a horrendous wall, the last time I saw the one between Jerusalem and Ramallah and Jericho, 40 feet high.

Concrete wall. High as a four-story building. And it's been built between the Palestinian land and other Palestinian land. Nowhere does this wall separate Palestinian land from Israeli land. In every inch of it, it separates Palestinian land from other Palestinian land. And it's not designed to protect Israelis from Palestinian attacks. I could throw - even a 40 foot wall, I can throw a baseball over it. You could certainly fire a rocket over it, or a mortar shell. What it's designed to do is to take away Palestinian land. And that's what I'm trying to reveal in this book.

Tavis: That, then, becomes, in short order, the problem. What's the central thesis of the book with regard to how to get this process of peace moving again?

Carter: The basic way to get it moving again is to have good-faith talks between the Israeli leaders under the prime minister, or the prime minister himself, and the leader of the Palestinians. The president of the Palestinian National Authority, the president of the PLO, the only leader of the Palestinian, Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). He was chosen, even when Arafat was still in office, as you probably remember.

President Bush and Ariel Sharon, the Prime Minister of Israel, said that President Arafat, who had negotiated the Oslo Agreement, got the Nobel Peace Prize for it, wasn't qualified to speak for the Palestinians. So Israel and Palestinian hand-picked Mahmoud Abbas. And President Bush called him the voice of moderation for the Palestinians. So, he was made prime minister. Arafat was still president.

So for three years, there was never one day of peace talks. And then Arafat died. The Carter Center - I personally went over and helped conduct an election. Mahmoud Abbas was elected president to replace Arafat. That was two years ago, in January. Not a single day of peace talks.

Tavis: How complicit, then, would you say the Bush administration is in what is happening or not happening, as it were, with regard to peace in the Middle East?

Carter: Well, I wouldn't wanna use - I don't know the connotations of the word 'complicit.' But they're certainly involved in deeply supporting every action that the Israeli government takes, to the detriment of the Palestinians. And one thing that I feel free to criticize Washington about is that early this year, Hamas candidates ran for the parliament for the first time.

They never had wanted to be involved before. They got 42 percent of the vote. As a result of that, the United States and Israel orchestrated a massive punishment for all the Palestinian people, because they gave 42 percent of their votes to the Hamas candidates. And they cut off all foreign aid to them, and humanitarian aid. And they won't even let the Palestinians have their own taxes to use to pay their teachers and their nurses and their welfare workers and their policemen and their firemen.

Since the Palestinians voted that way, none of those people have been paid. So why punish an entire innocent people because they participated in a democracy that President Bush ordained? As a matter of fact, when I was on the way over to Palestine to help with that election, the Israelis didn't wanna have it. And Arafat's party didn't wanna have it. But President Bush insisted that it go forward, and Hamas got 42 percent of the vote. So why punish the people for it? I really find fault with that.

Tavis: Because I know you relatively well - we've talked a number of times over the years on radio and television - I knew that the book had to be more balanced than many in the media were portraying it. So I got the book; I read the book, and in fact I was not at all shocked to find out at the very beginning of the book, early on, you talk about the Palestinians and how they have to want peace just as badly.

Carter: Absolutely.

Tavis: How they have to stop engaging in violence in the way that they do. Why do you think that part of the book, that message, is not being put out there? 'Cause you start the book talking about that.

Carter: Because the people that have been talking about it, most of them are still absolutely and totally committed to Israel, which I understand. I'm an evangelical Christian, and I teach about Israel and the harmony with Israel. Every Sunday, I talk - yesterday, in my little church in Plains. I talked last week, last Sunday, also. Teach about 40 times a year, half in the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, half in the New Testament.

So there's a melding there of it, and I can understand that. But another premise that everybody has, if you ask the average person on the street, is Hamas committing terrorist acts, right? And the answer would be yes, because that's all they read in the news media. Well, as a matter of fact, in August of 1994, or 2004, almost a year and a half ago, Hamas declared a unilateral ceasefire.

They call it a 'hudna.' And there hasn't been a single Israeli killed with a Hamas terrorist attack since August of 2004. And the reason they did it, excuse me, was not to protect Israelis, but because they were getting ready to run for local office, and they wanted to have the image among the Palestinian people of being for peace. So they've never committed a terrorist act to hurt an Israeli now for 18 months.

Tavis: Let me go back to the title of the book, 'Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.' You referenced John Conyers in this conversation earlier. His words are now being used in an ad. Jonathan, let me see this ad. There's an ad that - a full page ad almost - that ran in today's 'Los Angeles Times,' and I suspect in other papers around the other country as well, by the ADL, the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization.

There's only one honest thing about President Carter's new book. The criticism. And then it goes on to quote John Conyers, who says that your use of the word 'apartheid' does not serve the cause of peace. It is against the Jewish people in particular. What I wanted to ask you about was whether or not - I wanna ask you, President Carter, whether or not you think, respectfully, using a word like 'apartheid,' in the minds of some, unfairly and perhaps unwittingly compares tragedies. Never mind you're trying to be provocative and jumpstart a conversation. Maybe you're comparing tragedies, and folk don't take kindly to that.

Carter: Well, if you go to Palestine and see what's being done to the Palestinians, their land completely taken away from them; all of their basic rights taken away from them; they have to have passes to go anywhere; there are 715 roads that are blocked. You have to have a special pass to get through every Israeli roadblock. They never know if they're gonna get through or not.

They have built this wall, which I mentioned already, even between a major church right outside of Jerusalem - between Jerusalem and Bethlehem there's only three miles - named after Martha. Martha and Mary were the sisters of Lazarus, who was raised from the dead. That church had 2,000 Christian members. And the wall is built between the church and its members. And its members can't get into the church because the church is now inside Jerusalem. And the Israelis won't let the Palestinians go into Jerusalem.

This is what's happening to them. And I would say, in many ways, it's worse than the treatment of Black people in South Africa under apartheid. It's worse. There's a difference, though, that I make very plain in the book, and that is this apartheid in Palestine is not based on racism. It's based on a minority of Israelis' desire for Palestinian land. It's not racism.

So there's a difference, and I make it plain in my book.

Tavis: But if I, respectfully, sir, were a Black South African, to have someone say to me that what they're doing is worse than what we went through, than the necklacing, than all these in apartheid, that's the point I'm getting at. That might not be taken so well by a Black South African.

Carter: Well, I would regret that. But I didn't say in all cases, I said in many ways, it's worse.

Tavis: It's worse.

Carter: And I'll say this. When we go to hold an election there, to monitor elections, we have to go to every substantial community in the entire Palestine area. In East Jerusalem and Gaza and in the West Bank. And when I get there and I talk to the correspondents for the major American news media, they agree with me completely. I don't know what they send back to the (laugh) (unintelligible).

Tavis: I was gonna say, that's not what we read every day.

Carter: You don't read it, no. You don't read it. Why? Why? But I don't think we'll ever see Israel have peace, which I pray for, unless the debate is opened up and peace talks recommence after now a six-year absence, and the Arab countries recognize Israel. As a matter of fact, as I point out in the book, all of this is quoted. In 2003, 2002, excuse me, the 23 Arab countries agreed to recognize Israel's right to exist in peace inside their legal borders.

And it was initiated by the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, who's now the king of Saudi Arabia. And later, it was passed. Unanimously. And later, they asked Abdullah, 'What does this mean when you say recognize Israel's right to exist and live in peace?' And he said, 'What we mean is that we'll deal with Israel just like we deal with another Arab country.' But that's not something that Israel is willing to accept, to live inside their own borders. The international borders.

Tavis: Well, a new debate has been started, thanks to the new book by former president and Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter. The book is called 'Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.' The president has spent a lifetime trying to do his part to make America and the world a better place to live and work. He continues to do that through Habitat for Humanity. I would never have him on this program without reminding you of the Habitat work. Call 1-800-HABITAT if you wanna volunteer or donate in New Orleans specifically or anyplace else around the country.

Carter: Well, I was there Saturday building houses and everything.

Tavis: Yeah, I read you were.

Carter: And they need volunteers. They need volunteers. I hope everybody - give that number one more time, if you don't mind.

Tavis: Mr. President, whatever - (laugh) 1-800-HABITAT. (Laugh)

Carter: All right.

Tavis: 1-800-HABITAT. Mr. President, nice to have you on.

Carter: Yes, good to be with you, Tavis, thank you.

Tavis: Good to see you.

That's our show for tonight. Catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles, thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.