In his recently published memoir of his first term in office, the former president Barack Obama reserves some harsh words for Benjamin Netanyahu—and for AIPAC—that reveal his misunderstanding of the Jewish state’s predicament. The roots of that misunderstanding perhaps come from the widely shared but deeply distorted version of Israeli history Obama sets forth in the book’s pages. Examining this history, Dov Lipman—who states that he has never before criticized the former president in public—writes:
Obama tells the story of the establishment of the state of Israel in two sentences, which are nothing short of outright revisionist history: “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.”
The two sides didn’t “fall into war” when Britain withdrew; the two sides had been fighting for decades, with the Arabs—who rejected more than half-a-century of efforts to establish a Jewish state in the region—attacking the Jews, and the Jews defending themselves. When the British then left the area in May 1948, the Jews made a very difficult decision to declare their independence based on the UN Partition Plan, which [called for the creation of] a Jewish state alongside an Arab state.
There were no “Jewish militias claiming victory.” There was a unified Jewish army that formed the Israel Defense Forces, which knew that the surrounding Arab countries would begin an all-out assault to destroy Israel the moment its Jewish leadership declared an independent fledgling Jewish state. And that is exactly what the Arab armies did. The new state of Israel fought off that assault for months, emerging in 1949 both weakened and fragile.
Obama’s perspective on the formation of the state of Israel no doubt affected his foreign policy regarding the Jewish state. If one sees Israel as a colonial force occupying the land as a result of its “armed militias,” then it will be treated as an outsider that wronged others to establish itself as a state.
Similar affronts to the historical record appear as Obama traces the history of Jewish state to the present, writing that “Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors” for the 30 years after its founding, not mentioning that it was repeatedly attacked by those who sought its destruction.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/obamas-revisionist-promised-land/