Former US president Barack Obama has accused both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership of a “cynical game” which priorities staying in power over peace.
Mr Obama told a sold-out audience in the 3Arena that he was “never the best of friends” with the Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu who remains in power.
Mr Obama added that he was not always popular in the Middle East because he would “call them out on it”.
“The politicians, they have a vested interest in maintaining the notion that it is simply us and them and that it is their fault because that helps keep them in power. It is a cynical game and I watched it throughout my presidency,” he added.
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He said both the Israelis and the Palestinians were in a “prison of the past”. Many Palestinians refused to acknowledge that the historic vulnerabilities which ended in the Holocaust were a reason why the Jewish people felt they needed a home of their own.
“If you don’t acknowledge that truth, then it is difficult for the Jewish people, Israelis, to listen because that’s such a profound truth for them.”
Similarly, too many Israelis were unwilling to acknowledge that Palestinians were displaced from their lands “often violently, and that what has occurred since then has been an occupation.
“That creates a second-class citizenship or not citizenship at all – a no man’s land, and that would be intolerable for most people, all people, of any sort, and that they had a justified reason to be angry and frustrated by that.”
He said he believed it was possible to acknowledge that the events of October 7th were “horrendous and inexcusable” but so too was the situation in Gaza at present.
“And I think that it is important for us to acknowledge those of us who are not direct parties to the violence. to say, right now, children can’t starve. Right now, there’s not a military rationale for continuing to pummel Gaza.
“What is already, right now, it is unacceptable to ignore the human crisis that is happening in Southern Gaza. And it is necessary for us to insist that both sides have to find a path in which a Palestinian state and autonomy exists side by side with a secure Israel.
“It may not be possible to do immediately, but what I hear, either side somehow pretend by the way, it doesn’t require any of us to suggest that there’s some perfect symmetry between the two. Because that’s also a game we fall into. Well, what about this is? What about that? That’s worse than that.
“The point should be, how do you break the cycle? And that requires a certain level of courage.”
Mr Obama was in conversation with Irish Times columnist and author Fintan O’Toole. In the course of their hour and 20 minute conversation, they did not mention US president Donald Trump by name once, but Mr O’Toole referenced the “T-word”.
Mr Obama said the postwar democratic consensus grew out of the catastrophe of the second World War. Old enemies such as Japan and Germany were brought into the fold and the United States underwrote that consensus.
However, the West got “smug” after the end of the Cold War and started talking about the end of history.
There was a failure to acknowledge that there were winners and losers in globalisation and “folks who were left behind”.
During his presidency he felt the world was moving in the direction of multilateral efforts like the Paris Accords on climate change.
“But part of the challenge is that I had great resistance inside my own country. And in Europe you started to see the rise of a populist right that was resistant to the idea and that somehow global government is going to be taking their autonomy away.”
He feared many in the United States and in European countries believed that they did not want the rules-based order any more and want to return to “might makes right and there are no real principles out there except get what you can get and screwing the other guy.
“That kind of nationalism is some places is a sort of a return to the blood and soil nationalism that helped to give rise to fascism and World War II.
“That combination has buckled the international order and the challenge is that the history of that is bad.”
He said societies who want to return to a free-for-all were like a kid who burns his hand on a stove and forgets about it for a long time until he burns his hand again.
“Let’s use militarism and nationalism and tribalism, racial pride as a strategy for advancing and making ourselves great – it doesn’t turn out that well. We are profoundly ahistorical at this point. Much of the history we do consume is just fabricated.”
In terms of the situation in his own country, Mr Obama said he had resisted sounding “alarmist or hysterical”.
“I think it is indisputable that basic norms, habits of the heart and sharing ideas of what a genuine democracy looks like is fraying around the world and that includes the United States.”
Mr Obama recounted that when he was president he never sought the political loyalty of the US military or the judiciary. His “working assumption” was that they would be loyal to the constitution and administer justice impartially.
“That meant the military was not taking sides. That was a basic principle of democracy. You don’t politicise the justice system. When you do it erodes faith in whether or not the law is being impartially applied.”
