You don’t hear much from Barack Obama these days. America’s 44th president has largely followed the example of his immediate predecessor, George W Bush: write your memoirs, keep quiet and enjoy hobnobbing at the various foundations held in your honor.
Then came October 7, the day Hamas slaughtered more than 1,400 innocent people in southern Israel, swiftly followed by Israel’s military operation in Gaza, which has been ruled by Hamas for the last sixteen years.
Obama, normally reserved with his words, couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. On October 27, he warned Israel that if it wasn’t careful in how it prosecuted its war against Hamas, the attitudes of Palestinians writ-large could harden “for generations” and undermine Israel’s international support. Then, over the weekend, Obama engaged in a little self-reflection: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been so immovable for so long that clean hands were hard to come by. Hamas’s attacks were grotesque, he said, but Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory was also “unbearable” in its own right.
“If you want to solve the problem, then you have to take in the whole truth,” the former president told an audience at the Obama Foundation in New York. “And you then have to admit nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.
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