[Hat tip: commenter “Mike Plaiss.”]
Obama: knave, not fool. Here’s an excellent opinion piece in the WSJ by Elie Wiesel’s son Elisha. An excerpt:
Mr. Obama said of the Jewish people that after millennia of persecution, “they took land off people, and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’ ” …
Consider the word “excessive.” Was it excessive for Jews to buy land, at fair or often inflated prices, from absentee landlords in Beirut and Damascus who were glad to sell malarial swamps? Was it excessive for the Jews of Hebron, a community that had prayed there for centuries, to be slaughtered by rioters in 1929, nearly 20 years before there was a Jewish state, an occupation or a West Bank settlement to blame? Was it excessive for Jews to accept the United Nations’ 1947 partition plan while facing an impending invasion by five armies in 1948? To offer peace at Camp David in 2000, and again in 2008? To pull every soldier and settler out of Gaza in 2005?
Is it excessive to want to live in peace?
And what does “understandably” demanding one’s land back look like? Understanding Palestinian grievances isn’t the same as excusing Hamas, and Mr. Obama knows the difference. But words have consequences. The partition of India in 1947 uprooted more than 10 million people, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike. No American president would tell a crowd that the grandchildren of those who were displaced “understandably” want those homes back, because everyone knows where that leads. We saw where it leads on Oct. 7, 2023. Hamas’s leaders have since vowed to do it again and again until Israel is gone. There can and should be no understanding of those ambitions.
The deeper problem is the story itself. In Mr. Obama’s telling, Jews were oppressed in Europe and then arrived somewhere else and took too much. Jewish history in the land disappears. My father drew a line when he wrote in the New York Times in 2001: “To compromise on territory might seem, under certain conditions, imperative. . . . But to compromise on history is impossible.” That is the line Mr. Obama crossed in Belfast.
The timing of his remarks matters. This week he will rally in Detroit for Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate nominee, who has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid,” called it “bloodthirsty” and a “rogue state,” and, when asked three times on CNN whether Israel has a right to exist, refused to say yes.
Wiesel goes on to add that his father respected Obama but differed with him on Iran, and attended Netanyahu’s speech to Congress taking a stand against Obama’s Iran Deal. After that, Obama never spoke to him again. This surprises me not at all. He used Wiesel when he was pretending to be friendlier to Israel than he ever was, and dropped him when it no longer served him.
That’s not unusual for politicians. But I wrote long ago (although I don’t know how to find the post; this one written during his first campaign comes closest but isn’t quite it) that Obama was unusual at the time in that he pretended to be far more moderate than he was. I say “was unusual at the time” because now it’s the standard among Democrats. As with so many other things, Obama paved the way.
Yes, many politicians hide things – sexual promiscuity, for example, or their academic records. And sometimes they change their minds on something or even several things. But I can’t offhand think of another president who ran for office in the first place on a lie about who he was and what he intended. Obama did exactly that.
When arguing with people on the topic of Israel, I’ve often brought up India and Pakistan. They all have looked at me blankly; they either have no idea what I’m talking about and/or they don’t care because to them analogies are dangerous because they threaten their entrenched views about Israel. Can’t have that.
Wiesel ends his piece this way:
I hope Mr. Obama reconsiders his words and takes them back. It would be an act worthy of his friendship with my father.
That’s where he shows that he doesn’t quite understand what Obama is about.
