Fresh from cutting an ad in support of the obsessively anti-Zionist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, Barack Obama reminded a Belfast audience that the former president shares El-Sayed’s fixation with Israel.
Temperamentally, Obama and El-Sayed are as different as night and day. Obama is preternaturally calm, while El-Sayed is short-tempered and jumpy. But Obama has carried a chip on his shoulder about Israel since he left office, and, like El-Sayed, it’s the one thing he apparently can’t let go of.
So there Obama was on stage last night in Belfast in front of 7,000 fans, performing the hits:
“The citizenry of Israel has to rethink, to reimagine, how are your children and grandchildren going to live in this region? Are you just going to be behind walls and wipe out everybody around you, or are you going to find some just way of defending yourself while still acting in an ethical, moral way?”
Of course he gestured weakly at the Palestinians’ need to drop their militarism, but his focus was on how the Jews went breaking bad, according to extended quotes from his remarks in the Belfast Telegraph:
“The fact is that the Jewish people, for millennia, were oppressed, discriminated against, killed. Europe was responsible for much of it. They understandably sought a refuge.
“That is undeniable. What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive. And those people understandably said, ‘This is injustice and I want my land back.’”
By the end of the 19th century, the holy cities of Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Safed had Jewish majorities. Long before the Balfour Declaration was a gleam in anybody’s eye, Tel Aviv would join them. Then there were all the Jewish communities that didn’t constitute a majority, but they didn’t live on land that was somebody else’s. As Jewish immigration increased, Jews legally purchased land, often from absentee landlords. Rather than displacing people, they drained malarial swamps so they could live on land they purchased. Whose land, Mr. President?
Of course, none of this is new, nor would Obama listen to a history lesson that he so desperately needs. So what’s the point?
The main point is that Obama has Jimmy Carter Syndrome. Carter held two beliefs about Israeli-Palestinian peace: first, that Israel doesn’t want it; second, that ultimately a peace deal is about Jimmy Carter, not Israel or the Palestinians. So he spent much of his long post-presidency crusading against the Jewish state.
The Israelis, you see, had robbed him, Jimmy Carter, of glory. He didn’t want an Israel-Egypt peace deal, he wanted a Palestinian deal. He deserves credit for the Israel-Egypt accords, but they left him unsatisfied. He wanted to be the father of Palestine. On that, he failed. So he needed someone to blame. And guess who made a convenient scapegoat?
Obama is no Carter. By that, I mean Obama has nothing to show for his efforts in the Mideast. Obama is the least successful modern president when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict. His predecessor, George W. Bush, got Israel to leave the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. His successor, Donald Trump, got the Abraham Accords.
In the Middle East, Obama failed to an unusual degree. And he refuses to believe that it’s his fault—he doesn’t question why Democrats like Bill Clinton could get Bibi Netanyahu to sign a deal giving up parts of Hebron, or why a Republican like Bush could get Ariel Sharon, once the champion of the settlement enterprise, to give up settlements without receiving anything from the Palestinians in return. For that matter, he doesn’t ask how Carter got Menachem Begin to sign a massive land-for-peace deal in the first right-wing government in Israel’s history.
He doesn’t ask how all this happened yet he fell flat on his face with not a grain of sand to show for it. And he’s upset that Israel won’t just live quietly under an Iranian nuclear shadow so his personal legacy could remain intact. Instead, at this rate, his legacy is going to be his ability to hold a grudge.