President Obama: You Know Better

Dear President Obama,

First, congratulations on receiving an honorary doctorate from Queen’s University. It is yet another distinguished honor in a remarkable career.

I deliberately waited before writing this letter, hoping you might reconsider and retract your remarks made in Belfast on October 13. But with no public retraction to date, I feel compelled to respond.

When you described the Jewish people as having suffered centuries of persecution, only to then say that “they took land off people and they were excessive,” I wondered: How could someone with your brilliant mind and knowledge of history so fundamentally misrepresent the Jewish people’s connection to their ancestral homeland?

You know better.

You know that the Jewish people did not arrive in Israel as strangers to someone else’s land. You know that Jerusalem has been at the heart of Jewish identity, faith, and history for thousands of years. And you know that the State of Israel was not simply the result of European guilt following the Holocaust.

In fact, during your visit to Israel in 2013, you spoke of the Jewish people’s presence there more than 3,000 years ago. You specifically said:

“Yet I know that in stepping foot on this land, I walk with you on the historic homeland of the Jewish people.”

Those were your own words, Mr. President.  How do you reconcile what you said in Israel thirteen years ago with what you told your audience in Belfast?

And I am hardly alone in taking issue with your remarks.

Matt Field, a rabbi who celebrated your historic election in 2008, expressed many of my concerns in a compelling Substack essay, An Answer to Barack Obama, which I urge you to read.  He makes an undeniable point: the Jewish people were not strangers arriving in a foreign land. They were returning to their ancestral homeland.

As for your remarks about 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.

Mr. President, you have every right to criticize Israel’s government, and Israelis do so freely and often. 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 your remarks all the more troubling was where you chose to deliver them: Belfast, against a backdrop of growing hostility toward Israel and rising antisemitism in Ireland.

I cannot know what you intended by your remarks. But surely you understood how your words would be received. These were not the words of an uninformed observer.

They were the words of Barack Obama.

That is what makes your words so inexcusable.

Few political leaders have matched your eloquence or your understanding of the power of language to inspire, persuade, and shape public opinion.

Mr. President, you of all people know that words have consequences. When someone of your stature rewrites the history of the Jewish people, those consequences reach far beyond an audience in Belfast.

At a time when Jew-hatred is spreading with frightening intensity around the world, I fear your words have added fuel to an already dangerous fire.

I hope you will reconsider your remarks in Belfast and set the record straight.

You know better.

Respectfully,

Reuven H. Taff

An edited version of this article originally appeared in The Washington Examiner and is republished here with permission.