But the way Obama frames this matter is a whitewash of history. In his telling, Israel’s founders understood the importance of treating all Palestinians with decency, but over time these nasty right-wingers came into power and Israel is now careening toward a kind of apartheid. Obama does not use that word, though in private his secretary of state, John Kerry, does.
The truth is that Israel’s founders didn’t think much of the Palestinians. Before the establishment of the state of Israel, Arabs in British Mandate Palestine conducted a series of massacres of Jewish civilians. During the 1948 war, Jewish forces killed unarmed civilians at Deir Yassin and elsewhere. The Arab side also committed atrocities. It took until 1966 for Palestinians living inside pre-1967 Israel to gain full equal rights. Before that, they lived under a kind of martial law. And while Israel offered to exchange the territory it won in 1967 for peace, Labor and Likud governments alike since then have built settlements on the West Bank.
The national character of Israel is not shaped by a desire to be a light unto nations, as Obama says, but by the ordinary desire to survive. Zionism, at its core, is the recognition that Jews and only Jews can be counted on to save themselves from the people who will inevitably try to destroy them.
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