Obama’s Condescending Israel Statement Reflects His Presidency’s Failures

By Zach Kessel

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

 

The more things change, the more they stay the same. For Barack Obama, that means — even after six and a half years out of office — a pseudo-intellectual, equivocating statement on the Hamas attack on Israel and the Jewish state’s response, imbued with a characteristic miasma of self-satisfaction.

 

On Monday, Obama published a long-winded post on his Medium page, the platform through which he disseminates his opinions and pronouncements on current events in a manner that would have scandalized ex-presidents in a time not too long ago. Monday’s screed came after an initial October 9 note:

 

All Americans should be horrified and outraged by the brazen terrorist attacks on Israel and the slaughter of innocent civilians. We grieve for those who died, pray for the safe return of those who’ve been held hostage, and stand squarely alongside our ally, Israel, as it dismantles Hamas. As we support Israel’s right to defend itself against terror, we must keep striving for a just and lasting peace for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

 

Obama stood “squarely alongside” Israel and its right to defend itself. If one were to bet on how long that posture would last, one would have been wise to take the under. It took only two weeks for the former president to share his “Thoughts on Israel and Gaza,” thoughts to which readers who remember his administration might ask, “Where does he get off?”

 

When reading works like these from public figures like Obama, it’s instructive to note where the throat-clearing qualifications end and the real thoughts begin. Often, that demarcation takes the form of the word “but.” For the former president, the “but” came at the top of the third paragraph — third of 13.

 

In that clarifying section of what is really more an op-ed than an official-sounding statement, Obama writes that Israel must “seek to avoid, to every extent possible, the death or suffering of civilian populations.” Not exactly a novel idea: That’s exactly what Israel is doing, with its calls for Gazan civilians to relocate from high-density areas to more sparsely populated regions of the Strip so as to minimize collateral damage.

 

Obama issues a hedged acknowledgement of the fact that Hamas uses human shields, writing that “its leadership seems to intentionally hide behind civilians,” but proceeds to put the onus on Israel, not Hamas, to get them out of harm’s way — which, again, Israel is doing in a show of concern for civilians the likes of which no other country might display after suffering such a brutal attack on its own people.

 

He mentions the necessity of “actively opposing anti-semitism in all its forms” but follows that sentiment, as Democrats are wont to do, with the need for “rejecting anti-Muslim, anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian sentiment.” Sure, but the people who have been marching through the streets of New York calling for an “intifada” haven’t been Jews. It isn’t Jews who need to hear admonitions against the demonization of those on the other team in a more or less morally one-sided conflict.

 

The most highlighted paragraph, which demonstrates where Obama’s readers are and the types of people with whom he ostensibly wanted this statement to resonate, stresses the necessity of acknowledging that Palestinians “were not only displaced when Israel was formed but continue to be forcibly displaced by a settler movement that too often has received tacit or explicit support from the Israeli government.”

 

These are the words of a conscientious objector, of a man so high on his horse that the air is too thin for him to breathe. But the most disingenuous, most supercilious section of the statement deals with, of all things, the public perception of Israel.

 

Israel’s “decision to cut off food, water and electricity to a captive civilian population threatens not only to worsen a growing humanitarian crisis,” he writes, “it could further harden Palestinian attitudes for generations, erode global support for Israel, play into the hands of Israel’s enemies, and undermine long term efforts to achieve peace and stability in the region.”

 

First, the easy target: Israel bears absolutely no responsibility to provide food, water, and electricity to a territory run by an organization hell-bent on not only Israel’s destruction but that of global Jewry. And no country in the world could reasonably be expected to provide anything to an enemy during a time of war — an enemy, lest we forget, that is the elected government of Gaza and has a duty to govern, not indiscriminately kill civilians. For there to be even a semblance of a change of “peace and stability in the region,” eradicating Hamas has to be No. 1 on the to-do list.

 

But really, it is incredibly rich for the man who arguably did more than anyone else in the Western world to erode support for Israel to give public-relations advice. This is the guy who criticized Israel for wanting to move its government buildings to its capital city, Jerusalem, which every single other country in the world is allowed to do with nary a remark from American leadership. Obama is the one who warned Israel against fully defending itself against Hamas and rooting out terrorists during the 2014 Gaza war, suggesting that Israel bore the brunt of the blame for the deaths of civilians whom Hamas put in harm’s way.

 

Obama instituted the Iran nuclear deal, which gave the Islamic Republic sanctions relief, handing the ayatollah money that invariably went toward Hamas’s weapons silos. That deal didn’t even address Tehran’s sponsorship of terror. He accused Jews, who rightly opposed the agreement, of dual loyalty, smearing such critics as “lobbyists” who seek to buy off the American political system. His White House consistently leaked to the press, undercutting Israel’s defense position against Iranian proxies.

 

The coup de grâce, though, came just before Obama left office, right when those “lobbyists” couldn’t touch him. After a farewell address to the United Nations — in which, among his other talking points, he lambasted Israel’s “occupation” and caterwauled about Benjamin Netanyahu’s necessary security measures that were aimed at protecting his citizens against Hamas terrorism — he stabbed Israel in the back at the Security Council, a final middle finger to America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

 

The United States has historically played a significant role in defending Israel against a U.N. that has knives out for the Jewish state (see Phil Klein’s post about the secretary-general’s implying that Israel had the Hamas attacks coming). But in December 2016, Obama instructed the U.S. delegation to the U.N. to abstain from a Security Council resolution condemning Israel over settlements in the West Bank, allowing the denunciation to pass and tipping the balance of power in negotiations toward the Palestinian Authority by endorsing its twisted version of history.

 

And though Obama denied it, Israeli leadership at the time — and some American lawmakers such as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton — believed that his diplomats had worked behind the scenes to promote the resolution. Ron Dermer, who was then the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., said he had evidence that the Obama administration pushed the condemnation forward, an accusation supported by an account from a former White House staff member who said that Obama’s team had planned the timing of the vote so as not to scare Jewish donors away from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. An Israeli journalist who spoke to the former president himself reported that Obama said he had a resolution setting the parameters for a Palestinian state in the works.

 

Which makes Obama’s “Thoughts on Israel and Gaza” all the more disingenuous. His record speaks for itself, and he has no moral high ground. If he actually cared about Israel’s standing in the world, if it actually mattered to him whether the West lines up behind the Jewish state’s right to exist, his presidency would have gone much differently. Behind the eloquent talk and professorial verbiage lies a fundamentally dishonest politician whose time outside the White House has done nothing to impart upon him a sense of moral responsibility. He’s out of public service, and if he has nothing more than this to offer, he should stay out of public discourse as well.