Obama knows better. He just sacrificed 4,000 years of Jewish history

First, congratulations are in order for former President Barack Obama on receiving an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University. It is yet another distinguished honor in a remarkable public career.There was hope that Obama might reconsider and retract his remarks made in Belfast on Oct. 13. But with no public retraction to date, a response is necessary.When Obama described the Jewish people as having suffered centuries of persecution, only to then say that “they took land off people and they were excessive,” it raised an obvious question: How could someone with his knowledge of history so fundamentally misrepresent the Jewish people’s connection to their ancestral homeland? Obama knows better.He knows that the Jewish people did not arrive in Israel as strangers to someone else’s land. He knows that Jerusalem has been at the heart of Jewish identity, faith, and history for thousands of years. And he knows that the state of Israel was not simply the product of European guilt following the Holocaust.And the concerns about Obama’s account of Jewish history are hardly isolated.Matt Field, a rabbi who celebrated Obama’s historic election in 2008, expressed many of these concerns in a compelling Substack essay, “An Answer to Barack Obama,” which is worth reading. He reminds readers of something essential: The Jewish people were not arriving in a foreign land. They were returning to their ancestral homeland.As for Palestinians, of course they have their own history, their own suffering, and their own legitimate aspirations. Acknowledging Jewish history does not diminish theirs.But acknowledging Palestinian suffering does not give anyone, even a former president of the United States, license to rewrite Jewish history. The Jewish people’s connection to their ancestral homeland is not a political talking point. It is a historical truth.Obama has every right to criticize Israel’s government, as do countless Israelis. But there is an enormous difference between criticizing the actions of a government and portraying the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral homeland as simply taking land from others.What made Obama’s remarks all the more troubling was where he chose to deliver them: Belfast, against a backdrop of growing hostility toward Israel and rising antisemitism in Ireland.It is impossible to know what Obama intended by his remarks. But surely he understood how his words would be received.These were not the words of an uninformed observer — they were the words of Barack Obama. That is what makes his words so inexcusable.Few political leaders have matched Obama’s eloquence or his understanding of the power of language to inspire, persuade, and shape public opinion.Words have consequences. When someone of Obama’s stature rewrites the history of the Jewish people, those consequences reach far beyond an audience in Belfast.CRITICIZE AIPAC. BUT APPLY THE SAME STANDARD TO EVERYONEAt a time when Jew-hatred is spreading with frightening intensity around the world, his words risk adding fuel to an already dangerous fire.Obama knows better.Reuven H. Taff is Rabbi Emeritus of Mosaic Law Congregation in Sacramento, California. His commentaries have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Examiner, USA Today, The Sacramento Bee, San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications.