“Facts,” the English philosopher and writer Aldous Huxley once observed, “don’t cease to exist because they are ignored.” Yet, in his recently released memoir, A Promised Land, Barack Obama both ignores and omits key facts about the Middle East. In particular, the former president gets relevant Israeli history wrong.
Perhaps most disturbing, however, is Obama’s tendency to minimize Palestinian terrorism. For example, he refers to Hamas as merely a “Palestinian resistance group.” Yet, Obama doesn’t tell readers what exactly Hamas is “resisting.”
Obama’s inability—or perhaps unwillingness—to see Hamas for who they are is part and parcel of a broader trend evidenced in his memoirs. The United States’s 44th president repeatedly strikes a false equivalency between Israel and the terrorists who seek the Jewish state’s destruction.
Obama’s tendency towards striking false equivalency between Israeli security measures and Palestinian terrorist efforts is buttressed by an understanding of relevant history that is rooted in inaccuracies and false assumptions.
And contrary to what the 44th president implies, Jews didn’t take the land. Rather, most of the “settlements” were purchased—and often from the Arabs themselves. As the historian Benny Morris noted in his 2008 book 1948: “A giant question mark hangs over the ethos of the Palestinian Arab elite: Husseinis, as well as Nashashibis, Khalidis, Dajanis, and Tamimis … sold land to the Zionist institutions and/or served as Zionist agents or spies.” These families, many of whom would lead opposition to the existence of Israel and the right of Jewish self-determination, secretly sold land to the very movement that they denounced.
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