Obama’s false equivalence on Hamas is outrageous — and adds pressure on Israel

Former President Barack Obama has suggested a moral equivalence between Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities and Israel’s occupation. AP

Former President Barack Obama has suggested a moral equivalence between Hamas’ Oct. 7 atrocities and Israel’s occupation.

These are his words: “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.”

They led more than 100 Obama-admin alumni to sign a letter urging he use his “leverage” with President Biden to get a cease-fire in the war — which may have had an effect.

Pressure is already on Israel to make its temporary cease-fire in exchange for hostages permanent.

Obama’s obscene comparison reflects both ignorance and bias.

There can be no possible justification for the beheadings, rapes, burnings, kidnappings and mass murders of more than 1,200 Israeli babies, women, the elderly and others.

Obama has admitted as such.

Nor can there be any dispute that these abominations occurred and Hamas leaders have promised to repeat them again and again.

There are, on the other hand, legitimate justifications — legal, moral, political and historical — for Israel’s continuing military occupation of part of the West Bank, from where terrorists have repeatedly attacked Israeli citizens.

The occupation of the Gaza Strip ended in 2005, and control over its borders began only after Hamas began using its population centers as launching pads for rockets and its terror tunnels as underground routes to murder and kidnap Israelis.

Even more important, Israel offered to end the occupation of the West Bank in 2000-2001 and 2007, but the Palestinian leadership did not accept these offers.

So the continuing occupation is at least partially the fault of the Palestinian leadership.

The Hamas barbarities were not the fault of Israel, except in the warped minds of the bigoted Harvard students and other antisemites who blamed the Hamas rapes and beheadings “entirely” on Israel.

Obama’s discussion of the Hamas murders and the Israeli occupation in the same breath lends support to those bigots.

It’s as if a Southern racist condemned the lynching of blacks as “horrific” and then immediately criticized African Americans for their high crime rates as “unbearable.”

There is simply no comparison between the two, and they don’t belong in the same paragraph or even on the same page.

The legitimacy of the occupation is very much a matter of degree.

Ramallah is not occupied.

There are no Israeli troops or civilians in that beautiful, thriving and self-governing city.

We know.

One of us has been there.

Arab residents have more freedom in Ramallah than in most cities in Arab countries.

Their life there and in other West Bank cities is anything but “unbearable” — and Obama knows it because he, too, has been there.

Gaza City was not occupied after 2005.

Its terrible living conditions, even before this war, were entirely the fault of the Hamas kleptocracy that governs every aspect of life and whose leaders divert funds designed for humanitarian purposes to building rockets and tunnels and pocket billions of dollars in their Qatar bank accounts.

The expanding West Bank settlements are controversial, even among most Israelis.

But they were not the reason for Hamas’ mass murders, but the very existence of Israel, all of which Hamas claims in its charter is “occupied.”

Hamas would continue its murderous rampages as long as a single Jew remains “between the river and the sea” — that is in Tel Aviv, Rishon Tzion or Sderot.

Reasonable people can and do disagree about the nature, extent and justification of Israel’s occupation policy and who has primary responsibility for what Obama describes as “unbearable.”

No reasonable person can compare it to the murders and rapes Hamas committed.

Yet that is precisely what Obama did.

And in doing so, he provided ammunition to Hamas supporters who seek to justify the murders and rapes by pointing to the allegedly “unbearable” conditions under which they live.

If a condition is “unbearable,” then it follows — at least for some — that there are no limits to what can be done to make it “bearable.”

That is the claim of Hamas and its supporters, and Obama’s ill-advised and deeply immoral comparison lends support to that murderous claim.

Obama’s definition of what constitutes illegally occupied territory discloses his long bias against the nation-state of the Jewish people.

As he was leaving office, he supported a United Nations resolution declaring the Western Wall (the holiest place in Judaism) to be illegally occupied — along with the access roads to Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital.

He also regards the unification of Jerusalem to be unlawful and the entire city to be occupied.

Fortunately, his extremist views do not reflect America’s current policies.

But Obama remains influential within the Democratic Party, especially among young voters.

He should immediately retract his dangerous comparison and apologize for his insensitivity toward the victims of the Hamas slaughters.

Alan Dershowitz is professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and the author of “Get Trump,” “Guilt by Accusation” and “The Price of Principle.” Andrew Stein, a Democrat, served as New York City Council president, 1986-94.