The President and the Philosopher

Between former U.S. President Barack Obama’s remarks on Palestinian rights in Belfast on October 13, 2026, and American Jewish just-war philosopher Michael Walzer’s reassessment of his position on the Gaza war, discussed in The New Yorker on October 22, 2026, lies a profound tragedy: a mind that seeks to understand what is right but delays committing to it; one that recognizes a catastrophe yet grants itself more time to comprehend it, while Palestinians pay the price with their lives. Obama possessed the power of decision, while Walzer wielded the authority of moral justification. Between these two forms of power, Palestinians continued to wait for recognition of their suffering to translate into a stance condemning genocide. The irony is that ordinary people, guided by their instincts, grasped what the president and the philosopher were slow to recognize.

In the American worldview represented by these two men, Gaza became an ethical exercise. Its people live and die to provide philosophy with a more compelling example or to give a former president an opportunity to recover his moral clarity. Walzer’s reassessment therefore raises a question that extends beyond his theory: When does a philosopher become the philosopher of his own tribe, measuring the suffering of others by one standard while granting his own community additional time before subjecting it to the same test? And when does a devastated land become a laboratory in which intellectuals wait for catastrophe to reach its full scale before revising the tools with which they interpret it?

The New Yorker article, titled “The Philosopher of War Changes His Mind” and written by Jordi Graupera, traces Walzer’s reconsideration of the distinction between the justice of going to war and the justice of the means used to wage it. Walzer condemned the siege early on but supported the war and opposed a ceasefire. As the destruction intensified, he began to recognize that the brutality of the fighting could undermine the justice of the war itself. He also acknowledged that he had been slow to recognize a policy that had rendered parts of Gaza uninhabitable.

This reassessment is welcome, but it demands scrutiny: Why did the philosopher need such an extensive degree of destruction before allowing reality to challenge his theory? How many victims did it take to complete his conviction? The time he granted himself was not merely intellectual time; it was taken from the lives of children and their parents whose homes were brought down upon them, and from the life opportunities erased before the eyes of those who survived.

This is the tragedy of the intellectual whose universal principles falter at the boundaries of belonging: everywhere but here. He criticizes everyone except his own tribe. In Walzer’s case, he appears to struggle to subject Israel to the same moral rigor he applies to others. Some Jewish intellectuals, however, have confronted this test with courage, and it would be wrong to reduce them to a single position. Yet the question remains concerning the influence of voices that have granted Israel a moral exemption—and the price paid for their delayed reassessment.

Obama, meanwhile, spoke of Palestinians being dispossessed of their land and driven from it, and of Israel losing its moral standing when it treats military superiority as justification for taking whatever it wants—as though that moral superiority had ever been an established fact in the first place. Benjamin Netanyahu responded that the land is called “Judea” and that it was the place from which the Jews originated. The question concerned the rights of people uprooted from their land; the answer invoked the name of that land thousands of years ago.

When I was young, I wrote my master’s thesis under the title Palestine: The History of a Name. But disputes over the historical precedence of names cannot settle the rights of human beings. History can explain a people’s connection to a place, but it cannot grant that people a mandate to uproot another from it. If the names of ancient kingdoms became property deeds, no one’s home would remain secure. Force explains the ability to seize land, but it does not confer legitimacy on the seizure.

Obama’s remarks matter: returning to what is right, even belatedly, is better than never returning to it at all. For the sake of accuracy, however, he did not discover the Palestinian injustice only after leaving office. As president, he criticized settlement expansion and spoke about Palestinian suffering. Yet settlement construction continued, and the gap between his stated position and its political impact remained wide. What changes after someone leaves the White House: the clarity of the truth, or the cost of acknowledging it? And why does speech become freer when its author no longer possesses the tools to translate it into action?

Here, the president and the philosopher converge: in the distance between knowing and acting on what one knows. The former possesses knowledge that fails to find sufficient expression in policy; the latter confronts accumulating evidence before allowing it to change his judgment of a war. In both cases, Palestinians pay the price of waiting. What may appear from a distance to be a gradual process of reflection is experienced by those beneath the bombardment as a delay in their chance to survive.

I do not claim that the American mind is monolithic. The argument concerns an influential current within government, academia, and the media that initially accepts Israeli fear as credible while demanding further proof of Palestinian fear. An event becomes an acknowledged truth when voiced by a former president or a prominent philosopher, whereas the people who own the land still need someone to authenticate their testimony. Thus, a powerful figure’s change of heart becomes an event in its own right, while the insight of the victim remains outside the realm of recognition.

The responsibility of a decision-maker differs from that of a theorist, but both confer legitimacy that produces consequences. Political decisions can enable a war to continue, while intellectual discourse can provide it with moral cover. If we celebrate reassessment without examining why it came so late, we leave future victims waiting for the same recognition. A genuine return to what is right therefore requires changing the conditions that shape both thought and action—and asking a practical question: What can be repaired now?

The courage to acknowledge wrongdoing is not enough if the institutions that justified the war remain beyond scrutiny and the voices of its victims continue to be excluded from defining justice and determining when it should be put into practice.

Palestinians need a policy that stops reproducing their dispossession and an intellectual culture capable of recognizing their suffering before acknowledging it becomes safe. Gaza needs protection for those who remain alive and an end to its waiting outside the doors of the American conscience.

Will these reassessments change Palestinian lives, or will they merely improve the legacy of a president and the theory of a philosopher?

Originally published in the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat.