Obama on Israel: Broken Promise, Full of Falsehoods

dilbert firestorm's Avatar
https://www.nysun.com/foreign/obama-...se-full/91351/

Obama on Israel: Broken Promise, Full of Falsehoods
By DOV LIPMAN, Special to the Sun | November 30, 2020



I have never criticized former U.S. President Barack Obama publicly — neither during my time in the Knesset nor anywhere else — despite my having disagreed with many of his policies. I am of the strong opinion that Israelis should not engage in or interfere with American politics, and I regularly offer a blanket thank you to all American presidents, including Mr. Obama, for their economic and military support for Israel.

However, his memoir, “A Promised Land,” is filled with historical inaccuracies that I feel the need to address. His telling of Israel’s story (at the beginning of chapter 25) not only exhibits a flawed understanding of the region — which clearly impacted his policies as president — but misleads readers in a way that will forever shape their negative perspective of the Jewish state.

Mr. Obama relates, for example, how the British were “occupying Palestine” when they issued the Balfour Declaration calling for a Jewish state. But labeling Great Britain as an “occupier” clearly casts doubt on its legitimacy to determine anything about the future of the Holy Land, and that wasn’t the situation.

While it is true that England had no legal rights in Palestine when the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917, that changed just five years later. The League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations, gave the British legal rights over Palestine in its 1922 “Mandate for Palestine,” which specifically mentions “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

The League also said that “recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” The former president’s noted omission of the internationally agreed-upon mandate for the British to establish a home for the Jews in Palestine misinforms the reader, who will conclude that the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine had no legitimacy or international consent.

“Over the next 20 years, Zionist leaders mobilized a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine,” Mr. Obama writes, creating the image that once the British illegally began the process of forming a Jewish state in Palestine, Jews suddenly started flocking there.

The truth is that Jews, who maintained a continual presence throughout the 2,000 years that most were exiled from the land, had already been moving to Palestine in large numbers way before then; considerably more than 100,000 immigrants arrived in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Then, in the 1920s, high numbers fleeing anti-Semitism in Europe could find safe haven only in Palestine due to the United States having instituted quotas in 1924 on the number of Jews who could enter America.

The number of immigrants rose even more in the 1930s when Adolf Hitler rose to power and began his conquest of Europe while the world remained silent.

Historical context is important, and once Mr. Obama chose to write about the history, he should have provided the full context and portrayed the Jews as they were: a persecuted and desperate people searching for safety, and not, as he implies, strong conquerors flooding into Palestine.

His claim that the new immigrants “organized highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements” is also misleading. A more accurate way to describe it would have been: “Because the Arabs in the region mercilessly attacked the Jewish areas, the Jewish refugees had no choice but to take up arms to defend themselves.”

Acknowledging that the Arabs were attacking Jews before there was even a State of Israel is important historical context for understanding the Israeli-Arab conflict.

“A Promised Land” recounts, as well, how the United Nations passed a partition plan for Palestine in November 1947, by dividing the country into a Jewish and Arab state, which the “Zionist leaders,” as he calls them, accepted, but to which the “Arab Palestinians, as well as surrounding Arab nations that were just emerging from colonial rule, strenuously objected.”

Mr. Obama’s use of “Zionist leaders” instead of “Jewish leaders” plays right into the current international climate, in which it is politically correct to be “anti-Zionist,” while unacceptable to be anti-Jewish. (In reality, Zionism is the movement for Jews to live in their biblical and historic homeland, so being against that actually is anti-Semitism, but that’s for another discussion.)

The description of “Arab nations that were just emerging from colonial rule” is a clear attempt to justify the Arab refusal of the U.N. Partition Plan. Those poor “Arab nations” that have been suffering due to outsiders colonizing their “nations” simply could not accept another “colonial” entity, the Jews, entering the region.

The truth is that with the exception of Egypt, which was not colonized, none of the neighboring countries that rejected the partition plan had been established states before World War I. Yes, the post-war mandates of the League of Nations gave control in the region to the British and the French for a few decades, but this was in place of the Ottoman Empire that had controlled the region for centuries. Thus, the image of countries emerging from long-standing colonial rule as a subtle attempt to justify their objection to the Partition Plan is simply false.

Mr. Obama tells the story of the establishment of the State of Israel in two sentences, which are nothing short of outright revisionist history: “As Britain withdrew, the two sides quickly fell into war. And with Jewish militias claiming victory in 1948, the state of Israel was officially born.”

Wow. I don’t even know where to begin. The two sides didn’t “fall into war” when Britain withdrew; the two sides had been fighting for decades, with the Arabs — who rejected more than half-a-century of efforts to establish a Jewish state in the region — attacking the Jews, and the Jews defending themselves. When the British then left the area in May 1948, the Jews made a very difficult decision to declare their independence based on the U.N. Partition Plan, which gave the right for a Jewish state alongside an Arab state.

There were no “Jewish militias claiming victory.” There was a unified Jewish army that formed the Israel Defense Forces, which knew that the surrounding Arab countries would begin an all-out assault to destroy Israel the moment its Jewish leadership declared an independent fledgling Jewish state. And that is exactly what the Arab armies did. The new State of Israel fought off that assault for months, emerging in 1949 both weakened and fragile.

Mr. Obama’s perspective on the formation of the State of Israel no doubt affected his foreign policy regarding the Jewish state. If one sees Israel as a colonial force occupying the land as a result of its armed militias, then it will be treated as an outsider that wronged others to establish itself as a state. The former president misleads others into believing this, as well.

The most disingenuous sentence of Mr. Obama’s history of Israel is in his description of what happened during the 30 years following Israel’s establishment: “For the next three decades, Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors ... .”

What? I had to read that sentence many times because I could not believe that a president of the United States could write such misleading, deceptive, and damaging words about his country’s close ally.

Israel did not “engage” in any conflict with the surrounding Arab countries. The Arab armies and their terrorists attacked Israel again and again, and Israelis fought to defend themselves.

A straightforward history of Middle East wars involving Israel yields this basic truth. Facts are facts, and the former president’s misrepresentation of Israel as a country that sought conflict instead of peace — one that willingly engaged in wars with the Arabs — does an injustice to peace-seeking Israel and riles up anti-Israel sentiment.

Mr. Obama’s description of the 1967 Six-Day War continues this revisionism: “A greatly outnumbered Israeli military routed the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan and Syria. In the process, Israel seized control of the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria.”

Here he fails to address what led up to the war, when all those Arab armies gathered along Israel’s borders and declared their intention to wipe it off the map. He doesn’t describe Israel’s pleading with Jordan not to enter the war, nor that Jordan altogether had no legal rights to the West Bank, which it occupied in 1948 and annexed against international law in 1950.

Most significantly, Mr. Obama fails to mention Israel’s willingness, immediately after the war, to withdraw from all the areas that it won in its defensive battle in exchange for peace; and by extension, he also fails to tell of the Arab League’s “Three No’s” in response to that offer: no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel and no negotiations with Israel.

This omission serves once again to portray Israel as the aggressive occupier that seeks conflict and not peace.

The former president continues with another outright falsehood, which helps give insight into his policies regarding Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The “rise of the PLO (the Palestinian Liberation Organization)” was a “result” of the Six-Day War he writes. That makes it seem like the Palestinian liberation movement, including its violent and murderous attacks against Israelis, was only a result of Israel’s taking control over the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

It strengthens the message that if only Israel would vacate these areas, there would be peace between Israel and the Palestinians. This is what spurs leaders around the world to suggest that Israeli settlements in these areas are the obstacle to peace in the region.

There is one flaw with this story and logic. It’s not true. The PLO was established in 1964 — three years before Israel was in control of any of those “occupied” areas and three years before there were any settlements.

What exactly was this Palestinian organization liberating at that time? Is there any conclusion other than the liberation of the Jewish state in its entirety? What other option could there be?

This is why the “Free Palestine” movement chants, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” They are against the existence of Israel anywhere between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. They see such a state as a colonial enterprise with armed militias grabbing the land of others, just as Mr. Obama leads readers to believe when describing the formation of the state.

The false description of the PLO rising after 1967 serves the narrative that the “occupation” and the settlements are the cause of the conflict, and this, no doubt, had a direct impact on Mr. Obama’s “not one brick” policy, including freezing settlement construction, in an effort to bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Mr. Obama describes the failed Camp David accords of 2000, in which former Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians more than 90% of what they were asking for. “Arafat demanded more concessions, however, and talks collapsed in recrimination,” he writes. But the talks didn’t simply “collapse.” Sixty-six days later, Arafat unleashed the Second Intifada, in which 1,137 Israeli civilians were murdered and 8,341 were maimed by Yasser Arafat-funded terrorists who blew themselves up in Israeli buses and cafes.

Don’t trust my word on this. Mamduh Nofal, former military commander of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, revealed that following Camp David, “Arafat told us, ‘Now we are going to fight so we must be ready.’”

In addition, Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said in September 2010 that in the summer of 2000, as soon as Arafat understood that all of his demands would not be met, he instructed Hamas, Fatah, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to begin attacking Israel. And Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef, has verified that the Second Intifada was pre-planned by Arafat.

Not only does Mr. Obama fail to accurately connect the Second Intifada to Arafat’s not receiving everything the Palestinians asked for at Camp David — demands that would have prevented Israel from being able to defend itself against Palestinian terrorism — but he seems to place the blame for the intifada on Israel.

He describes the September 2000 visit of Israel’s opposition leader and subsequent prime minister, Ariel Sharon, to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem as “provocative” and a “stunt” that “enraged Arabs near and far.”

Mr. Obama neglects to mention that Sharon visited there only after Israel’s Interior Ministry received assurances from the security chief of the Palestinian Authority that no uproar would arise as a result of the visit.

In fact, Jibril Rajoub, head of Preventive Security in the West Bank, confirmed that Sharon could visit the sensitive area as long as he did not enter a mosque or pray publicly, rules to which Sharon adhered.

Even more incredibly, Mr. Obama describes the Temple Mount as “one of Islam’s holiest sites,” making no mention that it is the holiest site in Judaism.

An innocent reader who is unfamiliar with the region and its history reads this and concludes that it was simply wrong for a Jewish leader to walk onto a Muslim religious site. On the other hand, if he or she knew that it is the holiest site for Jews, then they would more likely wonder why there was anything wrong with Sharon’s having gone there — except Mr. Obama omits that part, leading anyone to conclude that Sharon was in the wrong.

That omission, together with the exclusion of Arafat’s plans for the intifada right after negotiations at Camp David failed, can only lead one to conclude that Israel was responsible for the five years of bloodshed during the Second Intifada.

Mr. Obama’s history lesson continues with the tension between Israel and Gaza. Remarkably, he makes zero mention of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza in 2005, when Israel pulled out all of its troops from the strip while forcing 9,000 Jewish citizens to leave their homes.

Anyone reading the president’s description of the wars between Israel and Hamas would never know that Israel no longer “occupies” Gaza, and that the Palestinians have been free to build a wondrous “Israeli-free” Palestinian state there for the last 15 years. That omission is glaring.

Finally, Mr. Obama’s misleading words describing Israel’s response to Hamas rocket fire on its civilian population only serves to inflame and incite anti-Israel sentiment worldwide. That response, he writes, included “Israeli Apache helicopters leveling entire neighborhoods” in Gaza — Apache helicopters that he identifies as coming from the United States, a subtle or not-too-subtle questioning of whether the United States should be providing Israel with military aid if it is used in this manner.

More importantly, what does he mean by “leveling entire neighborhoods,” other than to imply that Israel indiscriminately bombs Gazan neighborhoods, willfully murdering innocent people? And what human being on Earth wouldn’t be riled up to condemn Israel for such inhumane activity?

The problem is that it’s false. Israel targets terrorist leaders and the rockets that they fire into Israeli cities. Tragically, Hamas leaders use innocent Palestinians as human shields by hiding behind them in civilian neighborhoods, and by launching rockets into Israel from there and from hospitals and mosques.

Israel does its best not to kill innocent people, even airdropping leaflets announcing an imminent airstrike, and calls off missions to destroy rocket launchers or kill terrorist leaders when there are too many civilians in the area. Israel most certainly does not launch retaliatory attacks that aimlessly “level” entire neighborhoods.

I have no problem with criticism of Israel. We can debate the issues in intellectually honest discussions, and in the end, we may have to agree to disagree about Israel’s policies. But no one should accept a book that is filled with historical inaccuracies that invariably lead innocent and unknowing readers to reach false conclusions. Such a devastating book has real-life ramifications and consequences.

It is terribly disappointing. I surely would have expected truth, accuracy, and fairness from Barack Obama, America’s 44th president. But the falsehoods and inaccuracies in this memoir only feed the theory that Mr. Obama was, in fact, anti-Israel. Now, through “A Promised Land,” he seeks to convince others to join him.

________

Mr. Lipman served as a member of the 19th Knesset. From JNS.org. Image: Photograph of President Obama’s new memoir.
dilbert firestorm's Avatar
Obama sure knows how to spin an alternative history of Israel in chapter 25 of his book "Promised Land".


is this how he saw the Mid-east with faulty historical facts like that?
Unique_Carpenter's Avatar
Gotta love ghost writers that think they don't need to research.
United Nations created Israel.
Simple and easy to find research data.
United Nations resolution 181 adopted November 29, 1947. On May14, 1948 the U.S. recognized the new nation.
Gotta love ghost writers that think they don't need to research.
. Originally Posted by Unique_Carpenter
ya' think it was bill ayers again?
HedonistForever's Avatar
ya' think it was bill ayers again? Originally Posted by nevergaveitathought

More than likely Rev. (God damn America ) Wright. How could you sit and listen to that man "preach hate" and not have it influence you.
winn dixie's Avatar
Anyone remember when the kenyan left the Israeli Leader banging on the WH door for help? Yeah he had to go to the Republicans for help
Ripmany's Avatar
We need to stop spending money in israel it dumb, almost every in country pro jewish, go to los Angeles conforina more jews there than israel. There the reason we have paper money wars.
winn dixie's Avatar
I stand with Israel against all of its enemies!
Yssup Rider's Avatar
I stand with Israel against all of its enemies! Originally Posted by winn dixie
Even yourself?

Because you stand for white nationalism.

If you want to stand with Israel, why not just make Aliyah and put on a uniform?

(Didn't think so...)
winn dixie's Avatar
Even yourself?

Because you stand for white nationalism.

If you want to stand with Israel, why not just make Aliyah and put on a uniform?

(Didn't think so...) Originally Posted by Yssup Rider
More labels and assumption. Dummy
Yssup Rider's Avatar
Not an assumption. You’ve proved it over and over.

We all know it, Johnny Reb
lustylad's Avatar
Here's another article on odumbo's arrogant, smug, self-serving, elitist, dishonest and distorted revisionist memoirs:


Obama’s Prophet Motive Led to the ‘Promised Land’ and Trump

The former president fails even to see how his disdain for ‘bitter clingers’ fed voters’ resentment.


By Gerard Baker
Nov. 23, 2020 12:33 pm ET

Central to the mainstream media’s morality-tale version of recent American political history is the symbolic juxtaposition of the Obama and Trump presidencies.

It’s a classic story of the core struggle in human history: the tension in man’s soul between good and evil, between the idealism of our better nature and our baser desires and fears.

Twelve years ago, according to the narrative, we were given a leader, a man who was an avatar of innate goodness, one who showed us our own failings and offered a path to the hope of redemption. But we were unable to meet the heavy expectations placed on us. We turned away and, for a while at least, embraced the darkness.

It is self-evidently biblical, or would be if we weren’t a largely godless culture. There are countless such tales going back to the Fall, but surely the most redolent of our current circumstances is the story of Moses and the Golden Calf.

We are delivered out of captivity and ignorance by the greatest of prophets. But since we are weak and sinful, we (well, 47% of us, perhaps under the malign influence of foreigners) drop away from the path of righteousness. When our Moses has left us, for Mount Sinai—or Martha’s Vineyard—we succumb to idolatrous temptation.

No prizes for guessing the identity of the Golden Calf, all hefty and bulbous and dripping with bling, a fat, shiny idol to answer our earthier needs.

And now we have to be redeemed all over again.

The good news is that Moses is back. Not in the form of his designated heir and successor, but in the person of the prophet himself, brandishing heavy tablets in book form, ready to smite the idol and restore his people’s faith.

There’s no one who seems more captivated by the idea of Barack Obama as a historical figure on a quasi-spiritual mission than the 44th president himself.

The first volume of his White House memoir—and his third autobiography, but Moses had five books after all, so it’s presumably early days yet—is actually titled “A Promised Land.”

The book—and the accompanying encounters with carefully selected, properly reverential media figures—is timed perfectly to fulfill its intention of explaining the moral arc on which America finds itself.

In this telling Mr. Obama was elected to heal and reform a broken and flawed America. He kept his side of the bargain, governing judiciously, animated by reason and justice. But evil Republicans, propelled by right-wing media, refused to be conciliated. Instead they pandered to their base and exploited the election of America’s first mixed-race president to stoke ancient hatreds and ultimately to elect Donald Trump.


It’s nonsense. Mr. Obama was in the main an unusually skilled politician, a clever rhetorician adept at cloaking his progressive ideology in the mantle of a higher idealism.

Like other, less feted presidents, he was an opportunist too—with a cynicism that at times could be breathtaking. You get a good sense for this—as well as for the ideological leap the Democratic Party has taken in the past decade—from a telling little story about a man who once featured prominently in Obama teleology.

Mr. Obama recalls in the book how he had to jettison the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whom the future president once called his “spiritual mentor,” after ugly sermons surfaced about race and America’s irredeemably sinful history.

Well, praise be! Mr. Wright’s views on America are now more or less mainstream among progressives and much of the Democratic Party. “God Damn America!,” an imprecation so loathsome that Mr. Obama had to disown it to save his campaign in 2008, could now more or less serve as the title of the curriculum our progressive cultural leaders, Mr. Obama included, want us to learn.

The former president is highly intelligent, yet, as with so many of his ideological ilk, this natural intelligence is completely unallied to even a hint of self-awareness.

He fails even to see, let alone acknowledge, that it was his membership of a disdainful, ideologically monolithic class, rather than his race, that fostered so much of the resentment that led to the election of his successor. What followed Mr. Obama was less a suddenly discovered taste for racist authoritarianism than the revenge of those he had once dismissed as bitter clingers, or those who didn’t share his Princeton-educated wife’s view that his election was the first occasion in American history for genuine pride.

Many Americans voted for him and then for Mr. Trump. Surely some of them believed in Mr. Obama’s promise of comity only to see that in the end he wasn’t that different from the usual establishment politicians.

It’s a lesson you’d think this most self-consciously measured of politicians would appreciate. In appraising recent political history we could do with a little more reasoned nuance and a little less Old Testament righteousness.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/obamas-...mp-11606152822
adav8s28's Avatar

We all know it, Johnny Reb Originally Posted by Yssup Rider
Winn, do you keep your sheet on when you post? You did get rid of your Jefferson Davis avatar.
winn dixie's Avatar
Southern Pride is not racist idiots!

Yet labeling and falsely accusing racism is bigotry!

You guys are the problem with this divisive culture ya'll created!