By Jim Geraghty
Monday, November 06, 2023
Former president Barack Obama appeared on Pod
Save America — the podcast of his former aides Jon Favreau, Jon
Lovett, Dan Pfeiffer, and Tommy Vietor — and declared that regarding the
violence in the Middle East, “Nobody’s hands are clean — that all of us are complicit to some
degree.”
I quote the entire available excerpt, lest anyone accuse
me of taking anything out of context:
If there’s any chance of us being
able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of
complexity, and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas
that what Hamas did was horrific, and there’s no justification for it. And what
is also true that the occupation* and what’s happening to Palestinians is
unbearable. And what is also true is that there is a history of the Jewish
people that may be dismissed unless your grandparents, or your
great-grandparents, or your uncle or your aunt tell you stories about the
madness of anti-Semitism. And what is true is that there are people, right now,
who are dying, who have nothing to do with what Hamas did. And what is true,
right — I mean, we can go on for a while. And the problem with the social media
and trying TikTok activism, and trying to debate this on that, is you can’t
speak the truth. You can pretend to speak the truth. You can speak one side of
the truth. And in some cases you can try to maintain your moral innocence. But that
won’t solve the problem. And so, if you want to solve the problem, then you
have to take in the whole truth, and you then have to admit nobody’s hands are
clean — that all of us are complicit to some degree. I look back at
this, and I think, ‘what could I have done during my presidency to move this
forward? As hard as I tried, I’ve got the scars to prove it. But there’s a part
of me that is still saying ‘well, was there something else I could have done?’
That’s the conversation we should be having. Not just looking backwards, but
looking forwards. And that can’t happen if we are confining ourselves to our
outrage. I would rather see you out there, talking to people, including people
who you disagree with — if you genuinely want to change this, then you’ve got
to figure out how to speak to somebody on the other side and listen to them,
and understand what they are talking about, and not dismiss it. Because you
can’t save that child without their help. Not in this situation. [Emphasis
added.]
First, any time you see someone insisting, “No one’s
hands are clean,” or that everyone is to blame, there’s a good chance you’re
hearing from the person who actually is to blame. Because while life gives us a
lot of problems for which there’s a lot of blame to go around — poverty,
violent crime, schools that fail to educate kids — in every circumstance, some
people are more to blame than others. The easiest way to ensure that no one is
actually held responsible for what happened is to insist that everyone is to
blame for what happened. Claiming, “It’s everyone’s fault” is a sly way of
ensuring the consequences will be indistinguishable from the conclusion, “It’s
no one’s fault.”
Are “all of us complicit” in the horrors of terrorism and
violence in the Middle East? I suspect you’re reacting, “Me? What did I do?
I’ve just been sitting here.” Most of us either have never been to the Middle
East, or have only been there for short visits. How the hell are we “complicit”
in Hamas slaughtering toddlers? How the heck are we responsible for the
decisions Israel makes in retaliation? We can protest, or write this or that,
but the Hamas leadership and the Knesset are going to make their own decisions
based on their perceptions of their own self-interest and self-preservation.
“All of us are complicit to some degree”? Do you remember
anyone ever asking you if you thought there should be more violence in the
Middle East?
Whatever happened to the idea that the people responsible
for the violence in the Middle East are the ones who actually committed the
violence?
Don’t you think that Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh, chilling in his luxury residence in the Qatari capital of Doha,
is a bit more “complicit” in the current mess than you, me, or your next-door
neighbor? Or how about the Iranian regime that puts $70 million to $100
million in Hamas’s hands each year? Or how about Iran’s supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who just met with Haniyeh to demonstrate that Hamas has
the “total support” of the regime in Tehran?
Why is former president Obama so adamant that we, the
American people, need to acknowledge that our hands aren’t “clean,” right after
the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust?
This bloody conflict has cyclically flared up and died
down, sometimes exploding into outright war in 1948, 1956, and 1967. It
continued through the massacre at the Munich Olympic Games and the raid at
Entebbe, through administration after administration, Republican and Democrat,
from the formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization, through the Yasser
Arafat years, through the assassinations of Anwar Sadat and Yitzak Rabin,
through the Oslo Accords, through two Intifadas, through Ariel Sharon and then
Netanyahu. An on-and-off war between the Israelis and Palestinians has been
going on since about four decades before the average American was born. (The
average American is 38 years old, the average Israeli is 29, and the average
Palestinian is 19.) Almost everybody alive today was born into this fight.
Hey, remember when the Palestinians in East Jerusalem celebrated the 9/11 attacks?
When you choose to dance when my countrymen die, what exactly do I owe you?
Don’t you dare say that American stinginess forced the
Palestinians into accepting Hamas as their leaders. The U.S. is the second largest source of aid to the
Palestinians.
If you really want to make the argument that the United
States is somehow “complicit” in a conflict that’s been going on for 71 years,
don’t you think the person who sat behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office,
setting U.S. policy toward Israel, the Palestinians, and the Middle East for
eight years might be a little more “complicit” than, say, the average American?
If you read volume one of Obama’s post-presidency memoir, you’ll find bristling
contempt for his Israeli counterpart, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In
Obama’s eyes, Israel was more powerful than its foes, and thus was obligated to
begin the peace process by making unilateral concessions:
We knew that Netanyahu would
probably resist the idea of a [settlement] freeze. . . . [Netanyahu] would
complain that the good-faith gesture we’d be asking from the Palestinians in
return — that Abbas and the Palestinian Authority take concrete steps to end
incitements to violence inside the West Bank — was a great deal harder to
measure. Given the asymmetry in power between Israel and the Palestinians —
there wasn’t much, after all, that Abbas could give the Israelis that the
Israelis couldn’t already take on their own — I thought it was reasonable to
ask the stronger party to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace.
Sure, on paper, the state of Israel is significantly more
powerful than Hamas, but as we saw last month, that doesn’t mean Hamas can’t
spill a lot of Israeli blood. And when you put Hamas alongside Palestinian
Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah in Lebanon and throw
in the full backing of the theocratic regime in Iran — which wants to be a
nuclear-armed state — and the resolutely anti-Israeli regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria,
as well as the populations of Arab states that loathe Israel, well, then Israel
suddenly doesn’t seem so much more powerful than its enemies. And a unilateral
concession — more land for promises that are likely to be broken — doesn’t look
like such a reasonable request at all. For the entirety of Obama’s presidency,
he kept insisting to Netanyahu that he understood Israel and its long-term
interests better than Netanyahu did.
By the way, all those jerks out there who are harassing
Jews on the street, putting up hateful graffiti on synagogues, and sending
threats? They, too, believe that nobody’s hands are clean. They don’t believe
that any Jew they encounter is innocent. They believe that because they’re
angry at Israel, they’re entitled to take out their anger on any Jew they
encounter. Obama isn’t endorsing antisemitic harassment, but
he is echoing the same mentality of those who perpetrate it.
Let’s not forget, Obama’s remarks are a not-so-subtle
shot at Biden and his current stance. As Politico notes, “The remarks are a striking jab
at not only Israel, but against Obama’s own former VP: Joe Biden’s longstanding
and relatively closer relationship with Netanyahu has led the current president
to underscore Israel’s right to defend itself first and foremost. It also bucks
the company line Democratic leaders have been using on this matter.” Many of us
recall Obama warning another Democrat in 2020, “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”
Apparently, Obama thinks Biden has loused it up by standing too close to Israel
— somewhat ironic in light of Biden’s call for Israel to enact an unrealistic “pause” while
its ground troops are deep in Gaza.
Finally, I’ll refer you to the assessment of Liel Leibovitz, an editor at large of Tablet magazine,
writing at Newsweek:
Nah, man. Not all of us are
complicit. It’s just you.
It’s you, because you’re the one
who gave that stentorian speech about red lines in Syria and then sat by and
did nothing as those red lines were crossed and Assad continued to slaughter
his own people, allowing the Iranians and the Russians to creep in and fill the
vacuum left by your devastating lack of leadership.
It’s you, because you’re the one
who came up with the idea of empowering Iran, the world’s premiere exporter of
terrorism, Holocaust denial, and chaos, all the while telling the American
people you were merely trying to stop Teheran from getting a nuclear bomb.
Billions of dollars and thousands of dead later, we can all see how well this
idea — which you, with the eloquence only a professor could muster, called
“regional integration” — is working.
It’s you, because you’re the one
who delivered a parting gift to the region, ending your final term as president
by reversing four decades of American bipartisan support of Israel and
abstaining from a U.N. vote condemning Israeli settlements, while funneling
$400 million in annual payments to the despotic Palestinian Authority, which
then promptly used this money to fund its pay-for-slay program, doling out
large cash payments to any Palestinian who murdered Jews.
The current bloodshed in the Middle East is not just Obama’s
fault. Any U.S. president has limited ability to control the outcomes of a
volatile, dangerous region full of enmity, bitterness, and long memories. But
Obama has had a lot more influence over events in the Middle East than almost
any American not named “Trump” or “Biden” since January 20, 2009. Which, I
suspect, is why he’s so eager to convince the world that it is everyone’s
fault.
*For the millionth time, the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip ended in 2005:
In Gaza, the operation progressed
swiftly after its first day, and for the most part peacefully. Israeli soldiers
will likely remain inside the settlements for another five weeks, dismantling
houses, military installations and other remnants of a nearly four-decade
presence. The Palestinian Authority will then take control of the land, about
20 percent of Gaza’s territory.
One year later, the Gaza Strip held free and fair elections,
and Hamas won the largest share of seats. Hamas has ensured that there
hasn’t been a free and fair election since. It is conceivable that there are a
considerable number of Palestinians out there who would like new leadership and
a new direction, but no serious challenge to Hamas’s rule has emerged in the
past 17 years.
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