While Michael W. Schwartz finds much that is praiseworthy in the 44th president’s account of his first term in office, he considers Barack Obama’s treatment of the Jewish state to be “not just an inaccurate mess but an inaccurate mess of a very particular sort—a propagandistic mis-telling.” Schwartz writes that a reader coming to the book without prior knowledge would learn

that the roots of the Jewish state lie in a unilateral declaration by imperialist Great Britain issued while it was “occupying” “Palestine”; that the subsequent growth in the territory’s Jewish population was the result of “mobiliz[ation] by “Zionist leaders” who “organized highly trained armed forces” to protect their “settlements”; that the UN resolution calling for the creation of Jewish and Arab states in the territory was rejected by the Arabs because “they were just emerging from colonial rule”; that the resident Arabs were “driven from their lands” by the Jews; . . . and that the formation of the PLO [in 1964] was the “result” of Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War in which Israel took control of the West Bank from the Jordanians.

Whence all this falsehood? Schwartz believes the most likely culprit to be the education Barack Obama received at Columbia University, and the influence of such prominent academics as Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, who have done much to propagate the view that the Zionist project is inherently unjust:

What is most deeply disappointing about Obama’s parroting of the Said/Khalidi line in his memoir is not merely that it puts the prestige of a former U.S. president behind its distortions, but that it represents a huge missed opportunity to probe and question a false narrative—one that has caused untold violence and suffering. What might be called the lachrymose version of Palestinian history has left its adherents stuck in a world of grievance, envy, violence, and hatred. . . .

For all Obama’s interiority and self-questioning, he somehow couldn’t bring himself to apply that skeptical and self-challenging mindset to this particular subject. It is a perverse compliment to the power of this phony narrative that even a man committed to avoiding “truth decay,” and who has nothing more to achieve in his political life, could not put it under the magnifying glass, but mindlessly repeated it.

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.