Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz said he agreed with a trustee’s suggestion to invite Carter last month, if Carter were willing to debate one of his most outspoken critics, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. Carter, president from 1977-1981, rejected the idea. To Carter, the episode was proof that many in the United States were unwilling to hear an alternative view on what he says is the most taboo foreign-policy issue in the United States -- Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.

But others say it shows Carter himself is unwilling to debate his own best -- selling book, which has sparked allegations of errors and omissions, charges of anti-Israeli bias, and protesters at his book signings. "President Carter said he wrote the book because he wanted to encourage more debate. Then why won't he debate?" Dershowitz said.

Carter, who brokered the 1978 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, has said the goal of the book -- including its provocative title -- was to provoke dialogue and action. "There is no debate in America about anything that would be critical of Israel," he said in an interview Wednesday night.

But a furor has erupted because of the use of the word apartheid, which seems to equate the oppression of Palestinians with that endured by black South Africans under that country's now-defunct system of state -- mandated racial segregation.