Thursday is Abraham Lincoln's birthday. There will be a ton of memorials to the great president this week and many a forum too. The Obama/Lincoln parallel will be raised repeatedly. There is only one real way to treat that parallel; and that is my job here, to lay out the similarity between American corruption by the slave power and the American corruption by the Israeli occupation. The first resulted, at the end of a six-year national discussion (following on 80 years of temporizing before that), in secession and a terrible civil war. Today is 1858 all over again; and this time we must hope that the problem will not be resolved so violently.
Lincoln's rise was utterly connected to that great moral question. He was politically retired and a failure in 1850; he had not fulfilled his ambitions, and looked with envy on Stephen Douglas, a lesser man who was a national leader. Then in 1854 Senator Douglas pushed through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which ended the Missouri Compromise, and Lincoln's true career was born. He regarded slavery as evil, as the founders did. And holding on to the principle, "All men are created equal," he worked at the issue for the next six years of amazing political labors, through the formation of the Republican Party, the commitment of that party to a principled cause, the heroic debates with Douglas in 1858, the splitting of the Democratic party over that issue, and Lincoln's election to the presidency in 1860. It's an amazing story of reinvention, both Lincoln's and the republic's.
What the hero-worshipers won't tell you this week is how much the entire country was corrupted and devoted to slavery when Lincoln emerged in national politics over his simple opposition to it. Pretty much as corrupted as the entire political establishment was by Iraq when Barack Obama began his rise. Washington was socially and politically owned by southern gentleman slavery supporters, New York finance was also corrupted by it. Journalists and leading northern politicians were willing to truck with slavery, allowing it to go into Kansas, demolishing the Missouri Compromise of 1820. As Lincoln said repeatedly, slavery had "blown the moral lights out," and only a radical group, the abolitionists, were willing to take it on frontally. The great John Brown led a violent revolt over slavery, seeing his sons die at his side, and William Lloyd Garrison became a leading writer editor over the issue; but abolitionists were at the fringe of the official debate. Lincoln was willing to abide slavery in the South, so long as it did not take hold in the territories. To the exasperation of the abolitionists, he said that the Constitution insured slavery's persistence in the south.
Lincoln's achievement in the 1850s was taking a simple moral principle, that All men were created equal, and articulating it with such ferocity and imagination, in speech after speech after speech, his thoughts evolving as he engaged again and again with Douglas, that he was able in the end to drag a plurality of the democracy with him, to take a stand against slavery and thereby smash the Democratic Party. (And yes, I'm leaving out the Civil War, about which my feelings are not so clear). Those speeches are inspiring works of American literature, including majestic flights and humor. The repeated comparison of Negroes to crocodiles in the eyes of the defenders of slavery… the horse chestnut/chestnut horse joke… Lincoln's crack that he had somehow gone nearly 50 years without either marrying a Negro nor having her as his slave… and his repeated avowal that a Negro had the same right as a white man to eat the bread made from the sweat of his toil… He called Americans to their higher principles.
"Beyond and above all skill," says an editor quoted by Lincoln's biographer, Lord Charnwood, "was the overwhelming conviction imposed upon the audience that the speaker himself was charged with an irresistible and inspiring duty to his fellow man."
The analogy to our progressive/realistic movement in the U.S. today over Israel/Palestine could not be clearer. The Palestinians' lack of political self-representation for 60 years, most of that with a cruel and often vicious occupation of their lands, denying them freedom of movement, employment, betterment, recalls the horrors of slavery. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise is very much like the unending colonization of the West Bank by Jewish nationalists. The same sort of righteous/racist ideology that allowed journalists and politicians to argue that slavery was noble and good today allows neoconservative and ultra-Zionist intellectuals to argue that Palestinians have "shown that they cannot be trusted with sovereignty" (or in Rahm Emanuel's words, that Palestinians are not true partners), thereby trashing the principle that All men are created equal. Getting Americans to stand up for this idea is a great political challenge.
As a young progressive, Lincoln said that all people have the right of self-government, and the 60 years of denial of that right to the Palestinians–even as Pakistanis, Kosovars, Ukrainians, Georgians obtained that right with the ready consent of world bodies– has deeply damaged the American image in the Arab and Muslim world and played a central role in the events of 9/11. Israel/Palestine is an American problem in much the way that the southern economy was a northern problem in the 1850s. For Jerusalem is closer to New York today than Richmond was then.
Does Obama get this? Of course. That is the heart of the parallel. Last night he emphasized that his first acts in Middle East policymaking were naming a Lebanese-American envoy to the issue and granting an interview to Al-Arabiya. That marks a real shift in policy, he said. Obama is a very clear-thinking man. Trusted guides have been telling him for years now that dealing with Israel/Palestine is the main event of reforming American policy in the Middle East.
The real battle is a political one now in the United States. Lincoln acted in part because, a keen politician, he observed growing popular restlessness in America over the slavery issue, and not growing acceptance–at a time when nations around the world were stepping away from slavery. Today there is a popular restlessness over our Israel/Palestine policy, as the world condemns the occupation. No, this restlessness is not reflected by our politicians, but you can see it all around us, in student protests, in church leaders' anguished statements over Gaza, in some brave rabbis, in progressive Jewish circles, in academia, among foreign-policy realists, and all over the internet. There is a great impatience to wrestle with this central injustice at last, as Brent Scowcroft has said, and Obama's political challenge is to harness these forces so that he will one day be able to give the historical race speech he gave a year ago, this time as a historical speech about the denial of human rights in the Occupied Territories. Doing so will be the modern equivalent of Lincoln's electrifying House-Divided speech in 1858, which included– as all Lincoln's speeches did– a calm and helpful rendering of the history of the problem. Americans need to understand the history of Israel/Palestine. I have faith that Obama can give such a speech, because he has Lincoln's intellect, and something of Lincoln's boldness and sense of ambitious duty, also Lincoln's understanding of the historical moment.
This parallel is not a rigid one. More recent historical threads complicate the picture: South African apartheid, post-war decolonization, the legacy of the Holocaust in Jewish and American life. And Obama faces a greater political challenge than Lincoln did, in the overlap of the Israel lobby with the financial, cultural and media centers of American life. Lincoln was freer to blast slavery as wrong than Obama has been to blast the occupation. But all that can change through hard political labor; and maybe this time we can avert the regional catastrophe that the Civil War was in American life.
"If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it," Lincoln began his House-Divided speech. Well we know where we are now: supporting apartheid conditions. And where we're headed looks even worse. That's Lincoln's challenge to Obama, and he won't be able to do it alone.
(Phil Weiss)
