At his press conference today at the Carter Center, President Jimmy Carter announced he is being treated for cancer in his brain and he will accept whatever comes in months or years ahead (years, let’s hope!). He was asked about his top priorities “in the time that you have left,” the problems whose resolution would give him “the greatest satisfaction for the world.” [Minute 35 below]

In international affairs, I would say that peace for Israel and its neighbors has been a top priority of my foreign policy projects for the past thirty years. Right now I think the prospects are more dismal than any time I can remember in the last 50 years. There’s practically– the whole process is practically dormant. The government of Israel has no desire for a two-state solution, which is the policy of all the other nations in the world. And the United States has practically no influence compared to past years in either Israel or Palestine. So I feel very discouraged about it, but that would be my number one foreign policy hope.

Chris Matthews later said that Carter “stuck it to Netanyahu” in the press conference. While Jonathan Allen of Vox said on Hardball just now that the one thing he faulted in Carter’s post-presidency was his statements about Israel. This is what we mean by the Israel lobby: people for whom support for Israel masters all judgments. Carter warned in 2006 that Israel was facing an apartheid future. For this he was pummeled by leading journalists and exiled by the Democratic Party. Some day there will be an accounting of the American blindness.