Scott McConnell responds to Obama's speech in Cairo:
The Obama speech was terrific, for its build up and atmospherics, and for its relative specificity about Israel-Palestine. Of course it was only a speech and no one know what policies will flow from it, but the acknowledgment of that important word, “humiliation”—that Israel (with American support) have imposed on the Palestinians goes a long way. So too the use of the word, “Palestine”, instead of the more amorphous and distancing “Palestinian state.” (It’s the term my daughter brought back from her summer stint of teaching and tutoring on the West Bank—“In Palestine” she would say, as if the occupation could be made to vanish by words alone. I advised her not to use it on her graduate school applications.) So too, his making a direct connection between the Palestinian struggle and the American civil rights movement (though they are of course quite different.). So too, (noticed by the drunken young Zionist Americans in Max Blumenthal’s film) that he didn’t visit Israel en route, or reportedly give the Israelis an advance copy of the speech to comment upon. It’s now hard to imagine how Obama could retreat from doing everything he can to bring such a state into being, even if he wanted to.
This afternoon I attended a panel discussion on the speech at small DC think tank called the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. No one said anything remarkable. But 150 people squeezed into a space for half that many, just to be able, in some small public way, to be a part of the speech.
The political storm that breaks over this over the next year will be historic. One of the OSID panelists (liberal hawk Will Marshall) warned that there was a danger of Obama getting too far in front of the Democrats in Congress. Glenn Greenwald notes in his blog that a few Israel-centric Dems have already begun taking pot shots at the Prez. Greenwald notes mordantly: “Other than a handful of Democrats on civil liberties issues, there has been almost no public criticism of Obama from Congressional Democrats; all it took was some light pressure exerted on Israel for that to happen.”
What will follow will be a real test of political muscle. When an elderly Arab man in the audience today lamented that the Israel lobby was all powerful in Congress and would shut Obama down I wanted to say, see what happens if every time a Congressman was targeted for being too interested in the peace process, they received hundreds of donations, and, when the time comes, scores of canvassing volunteers. Donna Edwards, now prominently mentioned as being insufficiently deferential towards Israel, will be the first on my support list.
