When former presidents rewrite Israel’s history

Former American presidents enjoy an unusual privilege. They retain the title, the prestige, and much of the authority of the presidency, but none of its responsibility.

They can give speeches for which they are paid handsomely,  write books, and prescribe solutions to wars they no longer have to manage. Their words nevertheless carry the weight of someone who once sat behind the Resolute Desk.

That is worth remembering after Barack Obama’s recent remarks in Belfast.

Speaking about the establishment of Israel, Obama acknowledged centuries of Jewish persecution and the understandable Jewish desire for refuge. But then he described Jews as having “took land off people.” He also argued that Israel’s government has “ceded moral ground” by relying on its military and technological superiority rather than making concessions.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu answered directly.

“The Jewish people are not foreign occupiers in the land of our forefathers,” he said. “Our history is not a colonial enterprise. Our land is not stolen land. This is our homeland.”

The exchange has a familiar ring. We have been here before.

Jimmy Carter deserves considerable credit for bringing Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat together and helping produce the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. Camp David remains one of the great diplomatic achievements of the postwar era. But Carter’s post-presidential treatment of Israel increasingly departed from the evenhandedness you might have expected from the man who mediated that agreement.

In his memoirs, Carter portrayed Begin as a man who treated Palestinians with contempt and accused him of being interested primarily in a separate peace with Egypt. Years later, Carter published “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” a title that did enormous damage by attaching one of the most emotionally charged accusations of the modern era to Israel.

Begin did not forget Carter’s attacks. When Carter returned to Israel in 1987 and asked to meet him, Begin declined.

There is a lesson in that episode.

American presidents — sitting or former — are entitled to criticize Israeli governments. Israelis themselves do it every day and with considerably less restraint. But criticism is one thing. Rewriting the history that produced the conflict is another.

Obama’s description of Jews arriving in Palestine and taking land from others reduces a remarkably complicated history into something resembling a colonial land grab.

That is not what happened.

Long before statehood, Jews acquired land through purchase. When the United Nations proposed partition into Jewish and Arab states in 1947, the Jewish leadership accepted the principle of partition, despite serious objections to the proposed borders. The Arab leadership rejected it.

War followed.

When Israel declared independence in May 1948, neighboring Arab armies entered the former British Mandate and sought to destroy the newborn state. Palestinian Arabs unquestionably suffered greatly in that war. Hundreds of thousands became refugees. Some were expelled. Others fled combat, fear or the collapse of Arab communities as the fighting spread.

Those facts belong in the history. But so does the fact that the war was fought over whether a Jewish state would be permitted to exist at all.

To describe what followed merely as Jews taking somebody else’s land begins the movie halfway through.

Obama has used a similar framework before. Only weeks after the October 7 massacre, he said that “nobody’s hands are clean” and that “all of us are complicit to some degree.” He condemned Hamas, certainly. But the formulation placed the murder, rape, and kidnapping committed by Hamas into a wider moral ledger almost immediately after the attack.

Other former presidents have spoken differently.

Bill Clinton, who spent enormous political capital trying to produce an Israeli-Palestinian agreement, later reminded audiences that Palestinians had been offered a path to statehood and rejected it. “I killed myself to give the Palestinians a state,” Clinton said years later. “I had a deal they turned down.”

Clinton certainly did not believe Israel was beyond criticism. But he recognized something increasingly absent from discussions of the conflict: Palestinians possess agency too.

George W. Bush was even more direct after October 7. He predicted that once Israel began fighting Hamas, pressure would inevitably arise to claim that the war had gone on too long and that “both sides are guilty.”

Bush rejected that formulation. “One side is guilty,” he said. “And it’s not Israel.”

There is an important distinction there.

You can advocate for Palestinian rights without pretending Palestinian leaders never rejected compromise. You can mourn Palestinian civilians without erasing the decisions that produced wars. And you can criticize Israeli governments without transforming Zionism into a European colonial enterprise.

Perhaps the most famous Israeli response to American pressure came from Menachem Begin. It was not directed at Carter, as is sometimes recalled, but at the Reagan administration in 1981. After Washington announced punitive measures against Israel, Begin summoned the American ambassador.

“What kind of talk is this, ‘punishing Israel’?” Begin demanded. “Are we a vassal state? A banana republic?”

The language was sharp, but the principle was sound. Friendship does not require submission.

Netanyahu’s response to Obama belongs in that tradition. Former presidents are entitled to their opinions. They are even entitled to criticize Israel harshly.

But leaving the White House does not confer the right to simplify a century of history into a morality tale in which Jewish sovereignty becomes dispossession and Palestinian rejectionism disappears from view. And Israel, whether answering Jimmy Carter four decades ago or Barack Obama today, is entitled to say so.