Former US President Barack Obama has called for a nuanced understanding of the Israeli-Hamas war, criticising social media narratives about the conflict and insisting that “nobody’s hands are clean”.
Speaking in an interview with his former staffers on Saturday, Obama said Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israeli communities were “horrific” and that what is happening to Palestinians is “unbearable.”
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“If there’s any chance of us being able to act, constructively, to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas: That what Hamas did was horrific – and there’s no justification for it – and what is also true is that the occupation and what’s happening to Palestinians is unbearable,” Obama said in an interview for the Pod Save America podcast.
“And what is also true is that there is a history of the Jewish people that may be dismissed unless your grandparents or your great-parents or your uncle or your aunt tell you stories about the madness of anti-Semitism,” Obama said, adding it was also true those being killed in Gaza included Palestinians who had “nothing to do with what Hamas did”.
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Obama, who entered office with lofty promises to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, also criticised “TikTok activism” that he said ignored the complexity of the issue.
“You can pretend to speak the truth, you can speak one side of the truth, and in some cases you can try to maintain your moral innocence but that won’t solve the problem,” the former US leader said.
“And so, if you want to solve the problem, you have to take in the whole truth and you have to admit that nobody’s hands are clean, that all of us are complicit to some degree.”
