Barack Obama’s Anti-Israel Era

“The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers. Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land.” That trio of truths spoken by Prime Minister Netanyahu on Friday was directed not to some campus protester or DSA acolyte but to no less a figure than President Obama. “We’re not the Dutch in Indonesia” is how the premier put the suggestion that the Jewish homeland is not Judea.Mr. Netanyahu did not name the 44th president, but the rejoinder’s address was obvious. At Belfast earlier in the week Mr. Obama briefly acknowledged the Holocaust before launching into a symphony of distortion. He declared that Israel’s founders “took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice, and I want my land back.’” Mr. Obama accused Israel of ceding “moral ground.” Mr. Obama, now an elder statesman and a Democratic kingmaker, appears to be reverting to his faculty lounge roots. The early Jewish pioneers at Palestine bought land whenever they could, and absentee Arab landowners were often only too happy to sell. The Jews accepted the Partition Plan of the United Nations. The Arabs declared war, and it was in that bloody contest for survival that Israel’s borders were enlarged. The same would happen in 1967.“Excessive”? Israel has repeatedly made overtures for peace, only to be met with war. If Mr. Obama is referring to the war at Gaza, he neglects to mention that a ceasefire was in place on October 6, 2023, before thousands of Gazans invaded to murder, rape, pillage, and take hostages. One wonders what another nation, faced with a similar violation of its borders and depredations, would consider “excessive” in the face of such a depraved foe as Hamas. Mr. Obama, though, appears to reckon Palestinian rage as an understandable response to “injustice.” Yet the more the violence wrought by the Arabs is excused away — and in the case of, say, France and Britain, rewarded by recognition as a state — the more endemic it becomes. Mr. Obama has failed to grasp this lesson as far ago as 2016, when his administration refused to veto an anti-Israel measure, United Nations Resolution 2334, in a shocking abandonment. The 44th president is on Saturday set to campaign with a Democratic candidate for Senate, Dr. Abdul-El Sayed. These columns have noted that Mr. Obama’s endorsement of the radical Michigander is “a significant moment in the leftist lurch of the Democratic Party.” Dr. El-Sayed cannot even bring himself to acknowledge that Israel ought to exist as a Jewish state, and he has in the past painted Mr. Obama as a failure.On at least that evaluation we agree with Mr. El-Sayed — Mr. Obama’s signing of articles of appeasement with Iran over the nuclear issue was a failure. Even earlier, Mr. Obama took the first foreign trip of his presidency to Egypt, and at Cairo called for a “new beginning” with Islam. The president declined to visit Israel. Mr. Obama’s affinities with the anti-Israel worldview, long denied, have grown clear and, one might say, “excessive.”

Barack Obama’s Anti-Israel Era

Barack Obama’s Anti-Israel Era

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