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Dov Lipman on Obama
Former MK provides corrected version of ex-president’s Israel history
In November 2020, three years after leaving office, Barack Obama, the 44th president of the United States, published a volume of autobiographical and political memoirs under the title A Promised Land. It took his story to May 2011. The book has been translated into nearly 30 languages and has achieved multi-million sales. Chapter 25, which deals with the Middle East and the start of the Arab Spring, begins with a brief history of Israel. Obama’s perception of how and why the Jewish state came into existence and its subsequent story is clearly fundamental to understanding the ex-president’s policies and political actions in the region.
Reading Obama’s account of Israel’s foundation, Dov Lipman was appalled to find the ex-president using the same terminology and perspectives as that employed by strident anti-Israel voices like that of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement, which deny the country’s right to exist.
“I had expected truth, fairness and accuracy from Barack Obama,” he writes, but instead, he says, he found falsehoods, inaccuracies and misleading statements. Fact Over Fiction: A Challenge to Barak Obama’s History of Israel is his attempt to counter them.
Dov Lipman is 50. He was born, raised and educated in Washington, DC. He received rabbinic ordination while studying at Johns Hopkins University. He and his family immigrated to Israel in 2004, and in January 2013 he entered the Knesset on the Yesh Atid list. He served for two years on a number of committees before losing his seat in the 2015 election. He remains active helping olim and their families entering Israel, and as a journalist and broadcaster.
Lipman’s major complaints against Obama are a lack of empathy toward the Jewish people and its age-old Zionist aspirations, and either a lack of knowledge or a willful misinterpretation about the events surrounding the eventual return to its historic homeland and its subsequent history.
In short, he believes Obama views these events from an Arab perspective, and demonstrates this in example after example. Obama may have been constrained by the amount of space available to deal with these complex issues, but time and again Lipman finds fault with Obama’s actual reading of events.
For example, he believes Obama provides a totally skewed account of the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 and its subsequent effect. Obama cites the declaration as the source of problems between Arabs and Jews in Palestine, blaming the “occupying” British for helping create a Jewish state in a majority Arab region.
The Balfour Declaration announced to the world that the British government viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Lipman emphasizes its proviso, which Obama does not: “...it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
The declaration in its entirety was incorporated in the Treaty of Sèvres, signed in August 1920, which gave legal effect to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Palestine, as it was then understood, was to be governed by way of a mandate.
In the resolution of the League of Nations in July 1922, which passed unanimously, the whole world declared in an internationally legal instrument that it required a national home for the Jewish people to be established in Palestine, and that the responsibility to bring this about had been laid on the British government. Lipman points out that Obama’s “noted omission of the internationally agreed upon mandate… misinforms the reader, who will conclude that the movement for a Jewish state in Palestine had no international legitimacy or consent.”
When it comes to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Lipman categorizes Obama’s two-sentence description as “filled with inaccuracies and falsehoods.” Obama describes the process as war followed by Israel’s Declaration of Independence. Lipman points out that this is the reverse of what happened. He cannot understand why Obama writes that the two sides “quickly fell into war,” where the plain facts are that five Arab armies attacked Israel, and Israel defended itself against them.
Obama writes that after Israel was established, “For the next three decades Israel would engage in a succession of conflicts with its Arab neighbors.” Lipman observes: “Anyone reading that sentence would surely conclude that Israel was responsible for the wars with its neighbors. Nothing could be further from the truth.” And he goes on to explain the origins, progress and outcome of the various Israel-Arab conflicts, countering Obama’s account at many points.
And so, through the whole story, Lipman exposes statement after statement by Obama that puts an anti-Israel, pro-Arab slant on his account. Happily, during the course of countering this partial story of Israel, Lipman provides a fact-filled account of his own, which makes for fascinating reading. In addition to the eight chapters he devotes to his rebuttal of Obama, he includes no fewer than 16 appendices dealing in detail with key aspects of Israel’s story, from the return of the Hebrew language to Israel’s perpetual struggles with the UN body responsible for human rights.
Fact Over Fiction cannot reach more than a tiny fraction of the people who have read Barack Obama’s words and perhaps been influenced by them. But if only a reasonable number of individuals are made aware of what the ex-president really thought about Israel during his early years in office, and how this must have influenced his policies in the Middle East, Lipman will have done well. Fact Over Fiction deserves to be read and pondered over.