‘It’s now been well over a year since the agreement with Iran to stop its nuclear program was signed, and by all accounts it has worked exactly the way we said it was going to work. You’ll recall that there were all these horror stories about how Iran was going to cheat and this wasn’t going to work and Iran was going to get a hundred fifty billion dollars to finance terrorism and all these kinds of scenarios, and none of them have come to pass. And it’s not just the assessment of our intelligence community. It’s the assessment of the Israeli military and intelligence community, the country that was most opposed to this deal.’

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That shockingly dishonest claim in respect of Israel’s view of the Iran appeasement is from President Obama’s press conference Thursday. It is a reminder that Donald Trump is not the only politician on the hustings this season who has character issues. It may be true that some technocrats and military aides in Israel take the view that Mr. Obama articulated. But the important point is that the only authority democratically elected to speak for the nation, the government, emphatically rejects Mr. Obama’s version.

This was made clear today by Israel’s elected leadership, according to the centrist Times of Israel. It quotes a top minister “close to” Prime Minister Netanyahu as having “directedly contradicted” Mr. Obama’s suggestion that Israel now backs the accord. “I don’t know to which Israelis he spoke recently,” the minister, Tzachi Hanegbi, was quoted as saying. “But I can promise you that the position of the prime minister, the defense minister and of most senior officials in the defense establishment has not changed. The opposite is the case.”

Israel’s defense ministry also called Mr. Obama out on his misrepresentation — and went so far as to renew the comparison between the pact Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry maneuvered to reach with Iran and the appeasement of Hitler signed by Britain and France in 1938. “The Munich Agreement didn’t prevent the Second World War and the Holocaust precisely,” the ministry said today, “because its basis, according to which Nazi Germany could be a partner for some sort of agreement, was flawed.”

And, the ministry added, “because the leaders of the world then ignored the explicit statements of Hitler and the rest of Nazi Germany’s leaders.” Those things, it said, “are also true about Iran, which also clearly states openly that its aim is to destroy the state of Israel.” The ministry, according to the Times, noted that our own State Department recently reckoned Iran is the top state sponsor of terrorism. The ministry asserted that the deal reached “only damages the uncompromising struggle we must make against terrorist states like Iran.”

There is no doubt that there is dissent from these views within Israel’s democracy. It may be the most parlous polity in the world. But one of the things that makes Israel so outstanding in the Middle East is that it resolves its issues democratically and formulates an official line that is therefore more credible than that of competing regimes. If Mr. Obama is receiving private assurances that those on record as opposing the Iran appeasement have changed their minds, it would be appropriate for him to say so. Otherwise Americans, and Israelis, can conclude the worst about Mr. Obama’s version.