So Jimmy Carter got his audience at a university “with high Jewish enrollment,” as he had hoped. And despite fears that it would be a carefully orchestrated affair that would only boost the image of the former president and diminish the reputation of Brandeis University, it went fairly well. The questions selected ahead of time by the organizers were tough and pointed (one question, about a sentence in his book that suggested that Palestinians renounce violence only after they won concessions from Israel, led Carter to apologize for the sentence and call its wording “stupid”). And Carter clarified his use of the word “apartheid” in the title, reiterating that “the forced separation and the domination of Arabs by Israelis” referred only to “conditions and events in the Palestinian territories and not in Israel.”

The speech did little to mollify critics, like Alan Dershowitz, who continued to see a divide between the conciliatory Carter at Brandeis and the propagandizing “peacemaker” of his book. Even those inclined to accept Carter’s picture of Palestinian life under occupation are still awaiting his acknowledgement of the myriad ways the Palestinians’ leaders and their supporters around the world remain complicit in exacerbating their people’s misery.

One writer who sees analogies between practices by Israel and South Africa’s former apartheid rulers is Nir Eisikovits, a professor of philosophy at Boston’s Suffolk University, who puts the question this way: “If many of Israel’s policies resemble the practices of the white government in South Africa, how do the Palestinian armed organizations measure up to the South African resistance movement, the African National Congress?” In other words, as the headline over Eisikovits’ essay in the Forward puts it, “If It’s ‘Apartheid,’ Then Who’s the Palestinian Mandela?”

As the obscene bombing in Eilat this week proved, and the Hamas-Fatah civil war confirms, Palestinian armed factions “have shown little interest in nonviolence,” while their “more extreme organizations have consistently refused to distinguish between Israeli military personnel and civilians.”

And while the ANC pursued a path of peace and reconciliation with whites in South Africa, writes Nir, “the Palestinians have voted into power a government that refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, has called for its destruction and has aligned itself with Holocaust-denying Iran and its Lebanese client Hezbollah.”

This is the side of the story that must be told by those, like Carter, who profess to be interested in a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By imagining that Israel bears sole responsibility for the conflict, and that Palestinians have no means to alter their own destiny, is drawing the wrong lesson from reality, and the wrong analogy from history.