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Obama didn’t hide his agenda. In a 2008 campaign debate with Hillary Clinton, he said he would talk to U.S. enemies “without preconditions.” Once in office, Mahmoud Abbas was one of the first foreign leaders Obama called. An early interview with Dubai-based TV network al-Arabiya created the opportunity to apologize for America’s past injustices to the Arab world.

Soon after, Obama embarked on his “apology tour.” In Turkey he informed the Muslim world that “America’s relationship with the Muslim world cannot and will not be based on opposition to al Qaeda.” In Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are outlawed, he bowed to King Abdullah.

And then in Egypt, the infamous Cairo speech. In it Obama gave credence to the historically revisionist claim popular among Arabs that Israel’s statehood was a sop to European guilt, and moreover implied that Palestinian displacement was morally equivalent to the Holocaust: “Six million Jews were killed…. On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people … have suffered in pursuit of a homeland.”

Israel is the Jews’ ancestral home, never abandoned in their prayers or in fact, always inhabited by Jews. It is not theirs as a reward for suffering, but by indigenous right, a fact illuminated with clarity by the (pre-Holocaust) 1917 Balfour Declaration and the subsequent mandate adopted by the League of Nations, and then followed by the UN. This right cannot be abrogated.

The Palestinian territories were not stolen from Palestinians; they were liberated from Jordanian control. Until it became a modern political pawn, Jerusalem was never a sacred city for Arabs. Jews are not colonizers, they are the colonized: by Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Mameluks, Christians, Arabs and Turks. When Israel was re-established on the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, Palestinians were never mentioned as stakeholders in the Balfour Declaration or subsequent documents, because they did not yet exist (Arafat created the identity in 1964). The real issue is not Israeli intransigence, but pan-Arab Judeophobia. Arab leaders’ exterminationist agenda, quite as vicious as the Nazis, predates the settlements.