The Erasure of Jewish History Is Not a Path Toward Peace

There are moments when a public figure says something so profoundly at odds with the historical record that one must wonder whether the problem is ignorance, ideological convenience, or a little of both.

Former President Barack Obama’s recent remarks in Belfast, Northern Ireland, concerning the founding of the State of Israel, have left me with precisely that question.

Speaking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Obama acknowledged the millennia of persecution endured by the Jewish people, particularly in Europe. He conceded that Jews had understandably sought refuge in a place to which they possessed historical ties. Then, having made that concession, he proceeded to frame the establishment of Israel primarily as an act of dispossession.

“What is also undeniable is that they took land off people and they were excessive,” Obama said. Palestinians, he continued, “understandably said, ‘This is injustice, and I want my land back.’”

The problem is not that Palestinian Arabs have grievances, that the establishment of Israel involved displacement, or that the conduct of any Israeli government should be immune from criticism. The problem is that Obama presented a profoundly consequential historical narrative without adequately accounting for the history that makes the Jewish people’s return to their ancestral homeland comprehensible in the first place.

In doing so, he reduced the Zionist movement to a story of persecuted European Jews seeking refuge, arriving in somebody else’s country, and taking it from its rightful inhabitants.

That is not an adequate account of Jewish history. It is not an adequate account of Zionism. And it is certainly not an adequate foundation upon which to build a serious conversation about peace.

Let us begin with the most elementary historical fact: the Jewish people did not originate in Europe.

The Jewish people emerged in the ancient Land of Israel. Jerusalem was the capital of the ancient Israelite and Judean kingdoms. The Hebrew Bible, Jewish religious tradition, archaeological discoveries, ancient inscriptions, and the historical record all testify to a people whose identity, religious life, language, and collective memory are inseparable from this particular land.

The names Judea and Jerusalem are not recent political inventions. Neither is the Jewish attachment to Zion. For approximately three millennia, the Jewish people have maintained a continuous historical, religious, and cultural relationship with their ancestral homeland. Although successive empires conquered the region, Jewish sovereignty was lost, and large portions of the population were dispersed, Jewish life in the land never disappeared altogether. Jewish communities persisted in Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, Hebron, and elsewhere, even as successive generations lived throughout the diaspora.

Jews prayed facing Jerusalem. They mourned its destruction. They commemorated the land in their liturgy, observed its agricultural calendar in their religious traditions, and expressed the hope of returning to Zion throughout centuries of exile.

This was not an attachment invented by nineteenth-century European nationalists. It preceded modern European nationalism by centuries upon centuries. Modern political Zionism arose in the nineteenth century, in part as a response to European antisemitism and the failure of emancipation to secure Jewish equality and safety. But it did not invent the Jewish people’s connection to the land. It gave a modern political expression to an ancient national aspiration.

Nor were the Jews who immigrated to Ottoman and later British-ruled Palestine exclusively European refugees. Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa, including communities with roots in the region extending back centuries, were also part of the broader story of Jewish life and return.

To acknowledge these facts is not to deny that Palestinian Arabs have their own history, their own attachments, or their own national aspirations. It is to reject the proposition that one people’s historical existence must be erased for another people’s existence to be recognized.

The land has been home to Jews and Arabs. Their respective histories cannot be understood honestly by pretending that only one of them began before the twentieth century.

What does it mean to say that Jews simply took the land? Obama’s formulation is particularly troubling because it compresses a complicated history into a moral verdict.

Jewish immigration to Palestine increased substantially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jewish individuals and institutions purchased land, sometimes from absentee landlords, sometimes from other owners. Some of those transactions contributed to the displacement of Arab tenant farmers and cultivators. Other land was acquired under different circumstances. The history is not reducible to a single transaction or a single experience.

The British Mandate period also witnessed competing national movements, British imperial policies, intercommunal violence, and the increasingly desperate circumstances of European Jewry. The Holocaust made the need for Jewish refuge devastatingly apparent, but Jewish national aspirations existed long before Hitler came to power.

In the fall of 1947, the United Nations General Assembly recommended partitioning the territory into separate Jewish and Arab states. The Jewish leadership accepted the partition plan as the basis for statehood. Arab Palestinian leaders and surrounding Arab states rejected it. Civil war followed, and after Israel declared independence in the spring of 1948, neighboring Arab states invaded.

The resulting war brought catastrophe to Palestinian Arab society. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes, and many were unable to return. Their dispossession was real, consequential, and enduring. It is a historical fact that deserves serious examination, not denial.

But neither does that catastrophe erase the circumstances in which Israel was established, the Jewish people’s prior connection to the land, the international decision to recommend partition, or the war fought against the newly declared state. A historically responsible account must be able to hold these facts together.

It must also distinguish between the acquisition of land through purchase, the establishment of sovereignty, the displacement of civilians during war, and the later occupation of territories captured in 1967. These are distinct historical and political questions. Treating them as interchangeable does not clarify the conflict; it obscures it.

Obama’s sweeping language does not provide the necessary distinctions. It offers a verdict before adequately establishing the case. And when the history of Jewish statehood is presented principally as a story of Jews taking somebody else’s country, the implication is difficult to escape: Jewish sovereignty is somehow less legitimate than the sovereignty of other peoples because the Jewish people exercised their national aspirations in the place from which their own civilization emerged. Why should that be so?

I have become increasingly concerned by the ease with which historical narratives are revised to accommodate present-day political convictions.

The rewriting of Middle Eastern history is no less troubling than the rewriting of American history. In both cases, the temptation is to simplify the past into a morality play: one group possesses all the virtue, another all the guilt, and every historical fact must be made to fit the predetermined conclusion. History does not work that way.

The Jewish people have experienced persecution, expulsion, forced conversion, pogroms, and genocide. Antisemitism is not merely a European phenomenon, either. Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa also experienced discrimination, violence, and, in many cases, expulsion or flight, particularly during the years surrounding Israel’s establishment.

Yet Jewish history is increasingly presented in some political circles as though the Jews were simply European victims who subsequently became European colonizers. This framework makes Jewish indigeneity inconvenient. It treats Jewish national self-determination as a moral contradiction rather than a legitimate aspiration. The historical record is considerably more complicated than that.

One can criticize Zionist leaders, examine the circumstances of Palestinian displacement, condemn particular Israeli policies, and oppose settlement expansion without denying the Jewish people’s indigenous connection to the land. One can support Palestinian national self-determination without treating Jewish national self-determination as inherently illegitimate.

Indeed, any durable peace must begin with the recognition that neither people is going to disappear, and neither people can build a secure future by denying the other’s history.

Obama himself acknowledged that Israelis and Palestinians would remain in the region. He urged both peoples to reconsider the assumptions and strategies that perpetuate their conflict. That aspiration is reasonable. His concern about the moral responsibilities accompanying military power is also a legitimate subject for debate.

But a call for mutual recognition cannot begin by presenting one side’s national origins in a manner that obscures the very history upon which its identity rests.

If peace requires Israelis to recognize Palestinian suffering, it must also require critics of Israel to recognize Jewish history. Otherwise, the demand for recognition becomes a one-way street.

I make these arguments with a degree of humility, because there was a time when I did not understand the history as well as I should have.

Before October 7, 2023, my own knowledge of Jewish history and the history of Israel was comparatively limited. I had absorbed a narrative, widely circulated in contemporary political discourse, that portrayed Palestinian Arabs as a people driven from their homeland by European Jewish colonialists who arrived to establish a state at their expense.

I did not understand the extent to which this narrative omitted the ancient Jewish kingdoms, the continuous Jewish presence in the land, the religious and cultural centrality of Jerusalem, the development of modern Zionism, or the complex political circumstances surrounding Israel’s establishment.

October 7 forced me to confront questions I had not adequately considered before.

The massacre itself was a moral abomination. But the aftermath also compelled me to examine the assumptions through which I had previously understood Israel and the Jewish people. I began reading, questioning, comparing accounts, and paying closer attention to the historical record.

What I discovered challenged much of what I had taken for granted. The narrative I had accepted was not merely incomplete. To the extent that it portrayed Jews as foreign interlopers in a land to which they possessed no authentic historical connection, it was fundamentally misleading.

I will not pretend that every question surrounding Israel’s history has a simple answer. Nor will I suggest that every action taken in the name of Zionism has been justified. Intellectual honesty requires more than exchanging one unquestioned narrative for another. But intellectual honesty also requires the courage to admit when one has been wrong.

I was wrong to accept a framework that made Palestinian dispossession visible while leaving Jewish indigeneity almost entirely out of view. I was wrong to accept a history in which Jewish national aspirations appeared to begin with European colonialism rather than with a people whose relationship with the land long predates the modern nation-state. I have a responsibility to correct that understanding, and I take that responsibility seriously.

That is why Obama’s remarks trouble me so profoundly. A former American president, with the platform and influence that office affords, ought to be capable of presenting a history more comprehensive than the one he offered in Belfast.

The Jewish people should not have to defend the existence of their ancestral connection to their homeland every time the modern politics of Israel become controversial.

There is another dimension to this controversy that I cannot ignore: the political position of American Jews, and the increasingly uncomfortable place occupied by those of us who believe that support for Israel and opposition to antisemitism are compatible with liberal democratic values.

I am a Democrat. I have no intention of surrendering that identity merely because I disagree with particular Democratic politicians or activists. My political convictions include civil rights, democratic participation, equality before the law, and the rejection of racial and religious hatred. I believe these principles are compatible with a strong commitment to Israel’s right to exist.

Yet I increasingly find myself asking what place there is within the Democratic coalition for Jews who refuse to accept the premise that Zionism is inherently racist, colonialist, or illegitimate.

The Republican Party is hardly a reliable home for American Jews, either. Its own political contradictions, including the presence of antisemitic voices and the instrumentalization of Jewish identity for partisan purposes, should not be overlooked. Expressions of support for Israel are not automatically expressions of concern for Jewish safety, and political alliances must be judged by more than rhetoric.

But the Democratic Party has its own problem.

When Jewish history becomes subordinate to a fashionable ideological narrative, when Jewish identity is acknowledged only so long as it conforms to somebody else’s political expectations, and when Jewish attachment to Israel is treated as evidence of moral suspicion, the result is a form of political alienation that should concern every Democrat who claims to value pluralism.

American Jews must not be reduced to convenient symbols: useful when their suffering can be invoked to make a point, dispensable when their historical claims complicate an argument, and suspect when they refuse to denounce the existence of their ancestral homeland.

Nor should Jewish Democrats be forced to choose between their commitment to liberal democracy and their conviction that Israel has a legitimate right to exist.

That is a false choice. It is also an unacceptable one.

I am not asking the Democratic Party to endorse every Israeli government, every military operation, or every policy pursued by the Israeli right. I do not believe that loyalty to Israel requires silence about its shortcomings. On the contrary, a commitment to Israel’s long-term security and democratic future demands the freedom to criticize its government when criticism is warranted.

But criticism is not the same as delegitimization. Concern for Palestinian rights does not require the erasure of Jewish rights. And no political movement can credibly claim to oppose antisemitism while treating the Jewish people’s national aspirations as uniquely illegitimate.

A party committed to inclusion should understand that distinction.

The moral responsibility of historical truth

There is a reason that I find the rewriting of history so dangerous: historical falsehoods do not remain confined to textbooks, political speeches, or university seminars.

They shape the way living people are perceived.

When Jews are presented primarily as European colonizers, their indigenous connection to Israel becomes invisible. When Israel’s founding is reduced to an act of theft, Jewish self-determination becomes something that must continually be justified. When the Jewish people’s historical experience is acknowledged only as a prelude to Palestinian suffering, Jewish identity itself is diminished.

And when these ideas become commonplace in political discourse, the distinction between criticizing the policies of a government and questioning the legitimacy of an entire people’s national existence can become perilously thin.

We should be able to discuss the displacement of Palestinians in 1948 without pretending that the Jewish people had no prior claim to the land. We should be able to condemn terrorism without denying Palestinian aspirations. We should be able to demand humane treatment for civilians in Gaza without turning the existence of Israel into a moral offense.

The same standards of historical honesty must apply to everyone.

Obama’s Belfast remarks might have been intended as an appeal for empathy, a warning against the misuse of military power, or an argument for political compromise. Those are subjects worthy of serious discussion. But empathy cannot be selective, and political compromise cannot be built on a historical narrative that leaves out essential facts.

There is no contradiction between acknowledging Palestinian suffering and recognizing Jewish indigeneity. There is no contradiction between defending Israel’s right to exist and criticizing the conduct of its government. There is no contradiction between supporting Palestinian self-determination and rejecting the notion that Jewish self-determination is inherently illegitimate.

The contradiction emerges when one people’s history is made contingent upon the denial of another’s.

I have learned, over the past three years, that the defense of Israel is not simply a matter of defending a contemporary government or taking a position in an international political dispute. It is also a matter of insisting that Jewish history be understood on its own terms, with the same seriousness and intellectual integrity afforded to the histories of other peoples.

I cannot undo my earlier ignorance. I can, however, refuse to perpetuate it.

And I can insist that those who speak with the authority of a former American presidency do better.

The Jewish people do not need the permission of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, or any other political institution to acknowledge their own history. Their connection to the Land of Israel did not begin with the Holocaust, the British Mandate, the United Nations partition vote, or the declaration of independence in 1948. It is rooted in the history of the people themselves.

That history does not erase the Palestinians. It does not absolve Israel of responsibility for its actions. It does not eliminate the need for negotiation, compromise, or peace.

It does, however, establish that the Jewish people are not strangers to their ancestral homeland.

And no serious discussion of the Middle East can proceed honestly without recognizing that fact.

History should be the foundation of reconciliation, not the instrument of a political indictment. If we are to build a future in which Jews and Arabs can live in peace, we must begin by acknowledging the histories, identities, and legitimate aspirations of both peoples. Anything less is not a path to peace. It is another form of historical injustice.