A poisoned narrative
Barack Obama's new memoir is riddled with historical falsehoods and distortions about Israel
Nov 27
British Mandate Palestine, 1930s
When he was President of the United States, Barack Obama presided over an administration marked by unprecedented hostility to Israel. While he intoned the usual boiler-plate pieties of “candid friendship” deployed by the anti-Israel left and he maintained the security funding for Israel whose erosion would have outraged the American people, he persistently undermined its security and empowered those whose who were intent upon its extermination.
Only now, though, with the publication of his new memoir can we discover the depth of his malevolent ignorance about the history of Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish people.
Dov Lipman has written an analysis of this poisonous account for the Jewish News Syndicate, which you can read here.
Here is a passage from the book which purports to provide the history of the origins of the modern State of Israel:
The conflict between Arabs and Jews had been an open sore on the region for almost a century, dating back to the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which the British, who were then occupying Palestine, committed to create a “national home for the Jewish people” in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs. Over the next twenty or so years, Zionist leaders mobilised a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine and organised highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements.
This is a travesty. Here are some examples of Obama’s eye-watering errors:
He says in 1917, when the British issued the Balfour Declaration, they were “occupying Palestine”.
They were not. It was then part of the Ottoman empire.
Obama writes instead that the British “committed to create a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in a region overwhelmingly populated by Arabs”.
He totally ignores the fact that the League of Nations, the world body of that time which was creating new states throughout the region after the defeat of the Ottomans in the First World War, mandated in a binding treaty the creation of the Jewish national homeland throughout Palestine. He ignores the fact that, under this agreement, the British accepted a mandate in 1922 to create that Jewish home in Palestine and to that end to settle Jews throughout that land (which consisted of what is now Israel, the “West Bank” and Gaza). He totally ignores that fact that the League stated:
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.
Obama implies, totally falsely, that the Jews were colonialists who were not entitled to the land. He states further:
Over the next 20 years, Zionist leaders mobilised a surge of Jewish migration to Palestine…
He ignores the fact that the Jews were the only extant indigenous inhabitants of the land, for whom it had been their national kingdom centuries before the first Muslim and Arab armies added to the successive waves of colonialist invaders who had driven the Jews out. He ignores the fact that, throughout their 2000 years of exile, the Jews maintained a continuous presence in the land, starting to return to it in considerable numbers in the later years of the 19th century and with a Jewish majority in Jerusalem from the middle of that century. He ignores the fact that, on the back of this increased Jewish immigration, thousands of Arabs only then came to live in Palestine to obtain work, many of them illegal immigrants. Ignoring all this, Obama falsely suggests that the Jewish people displaced the land’s indigenous Arab inhabitants.
He implies that the “Zionists” were aggressive by organising
highly trained armed forces to defend their settlements.
He fails to note that these “highly trained armed forces” were Jewish civilians who were forced to arm themselves in the face of the savage pogroms the Arabs were conducting against them, murdering and mutilating them with the aim of driving them out of the land and in defiance of the League of Nations decision to create the Jewish national home there. He falsely portrays the Jews of Palestine as innately aggressive, rather than desperately trying to defend their lives and rights to the land against murderous Arab colonialists.
The falsehoods and distortions continue. Obama goes on:
In 1947, in the wake of World War II and in the shadow of the Holocaust’s unspeakable crimes, the United Nations approved a partition plan to establish two sovereign states, one Jewish, the other Arab, with Jerusalem—a city considered holy by Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike—to be governed by an international body. Zionist leaders embraced the plan, but Arab Palestinians, as well as surrounding Arab nations that were also just emerging from colonial rule, strenuously objected. 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.
For the Jewish people, it was a dream fulfilled, a state of their own in their historic homeland after centuries of exile, religious persecution, and the more recent horrors of the Holocaust. But for the roughly seven hundred thousand Arab Palestinians who found themselves stateless and driven from their lands, the same events would be a part of what became known as the Nakba, or “Catastrophe.” For the next three decades, Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbours—most significantly the Six-Day War of 1967, in which 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. The memory of those losses, and the humiliation that came with it, became a defining aspect of Arab nationalism, and support for the Palestinian cause a central tenet of Arab foreign policy. Meanwhile, Palestinians living within the occupied territories, mostly in refugee camps, found themselves governed by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), with their movements and economic activity severely restricted, prompting calls for armed resistance and resulting in the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). Arab politicians routinely denounced Israel, often in explicitly anti-Semitic terms, and most governments in the region embraced the PLO’s chairman, Yasser Arafat, as a freedom fighter—even as his organisation and its affiliates engaged in escalating and bloody terrorist attacks against unarmed civilians.
By stating “As Britain withdrew, the two sides quickly fell into war” Obama falsely suggests a symmetry of aggression in 1947/8 between the Arabs and the Jews.
He fails to state the truth, that five Arab armies joined forces to destroy the nascent State of Israel by waging a war of extermination against it. And that was after decades of Arab attacks aimed at stifling the Jewish homeland at birth.
And then get this — Obama states:
For the next three decades, Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbours — most significantly the Six-Day War of 1967, in which a greatly outnumbered Israeli military routed the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria.
What a jaw-dropping inversion of the truth. Israel didn’t “engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbours”; its Arab neighbours waged a succession of wars against it.
He states falsely that the rise of the terrorist Palestine Liberation Organisation resulted from the restrictions on Palestinians living in the “occupied territories”.
But the PLO was formed in 1964, three years before the Six-Day War which gave Israel control of those disputed territories.
After all these falsehoods, distortions and gross historical revisionism — and there’s much, much more of this nauseating stuff — which portray Israel and “Zionists” utterly falsely as aggressive and all-powerful colonisers, Obama has the gall to claim sanctimoniously an early sympathy with the Jews:
I believed there was an essential bond between the Black and the Jewish experiences—a common story of exile and suffering that might ultimately be redeemed by a shared thirst for justice, a deeper compassion for others, a heightened sense of community. It made me fiercely protective of the right of the Jewish people to have a state of their own, though, ironically, those same shared values also made it impossible for me to ignore the conditions under which Palestinians in the occupied territories were forced to live.
Ok, enough of this sickening bilge. Of course, to some of us this comes as no surprise. We always knew what Obama was. We knew that his hostility towards Israel was all of a piece with his spending many years as a congregant of the viciously anti-Jewish pastor Jeremiah Wright, and his association with the Nation of Islam run by the virulent Jew-hater Louis Farrakhan.
Yet it is nevertheless an eye-opener to read such a farrago of vicious rubbish, any part of which can be easily disproved by the briefest acquaintance with the facts but has apparently been swallowed wholesale by someone who was once a law lecturer. It’s also terrifying and devastating that this memoir, which of course has become an instant best-seller, provides a malevolent image of Israel which will be lapped up by millions — a lie that will poison their minds and swell still further support for the forces of evil in the world.
Obama calls his memoir A Promised Land. His book denies the truthful history of the real “promised land”, robs the Jewish people of their entitlement to it and appropriates the concept for himself.
Dov Lipman laments that one might have expected
truth, accuracy and fairness from Barack Obama, America’s 44th president.
What’s really astounding is that such a man was actually elected president of the United States. Twice.
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