Obama after his speech to people of Israel, 3/21, White House photo by Pete Souza
It was master-crafted as an ingratiating speech by the world’s most important leader talking on behalf of the government that has most unreservedly championed Israel’s cause over the decades. Enthusiastically received by the audience of mainly Israeli youth, and especially by liberal Jews around the world. Despite the venue, President Obama’s words in Jerusalem on March 21st seemed primarily intended to clear the air somewhat in Washington. It might be that Obama may now have a slightly better chance to succeed in his second legacy-building presidential term despite opposition from a deeply polarized U.S. Congress. Because the American economy continues to be in serious trouble, at least if assessed from the perspective of workers’ distress rather than on the basis of robust corporate profits, Obama was also eager to avoid being distracted by any allegation that he was not giving Israel its proper due.
As for the speech itself, it possessed several redeeming features. It acknowledged that as justifiable as are Israeli security concerns, “the Palestinian right of self-determination, their right to justice must also be recognized.” This affirmation was followed by the strongest assertion of all: “..put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes.” To consider the realities of the conflict through Palestinian eyes if taken seriously would represent a true step toward some kind of balance, at least at the level of language, that is, leaving aside the one-sided material and diplomatic support given by Washington to Tel Aviv. Seeing through Palestinian eyes confronts the ugly realities of prolonged occupation, annexationist settlement projects, the unlawful land-confiscating separation wall, generations of Palestinians confined to the misery of refugee camps and exile, second-class Palestinian citizenship, ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, and a myriad of Kafkaesque regulations and checkpoints that make the daily life of Palestinians repetitive narratives of humiliation and frustration. Of course, Obama did not dare to do this. None of these features of the Palestinian experience were made explicit, but left to the untender imaginations of his Israeli audience. Despite the failure to specify, Obama’s injunction to see the conflict through the eyes of the other creates space for empathy and reconciliation. This is a necessary feature of according the weaker and oppressed side the sort of recognition that is a precondition to any genuine peace process.
Obama also encouraged in a helpful way Israeli citizen activism on behalf of a just peace based on two states for two peoples, although accompanied by several disturbing qualifiers. Inappropriately, he urged that “for the moment, put aside the plans and process” by which this goal might be achieved, and “instead..build trust between people.” Is this not an odd bit of advice? It seems a stretch to stress trust when the structures and practice of occupation are for the Palestinians unremittingly cruel, exploitative, and whittle away day after day at the attainability of a viable Palestinian state. Given the undisguised outlook of the Netanyahu government, how can the Palestinians in their shackles be expected to embark upon a journey of trust?
Admittedly, this farfetched entreaty was somewhat softened by being coupled with a more plausible plea: “I can promise you this: Political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks. You must create the change that you want to see. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things.” Possibly, there is some remote hope to be found in these inspirational words, but one has to wonder ‘to what end’ given the present policies and programs of the Tel Aviv government and the beleaguered circumstances of the fragmented and meekly represented Palestinian people.
Beyond these observations, Obama’s speech was deeply flawed in three fundamental respects:
–by speaking only to Israeli youth, and not arranging a parallel talk in Ramallah to Palestinian youth, the role of the United States as ‘dishonest broker’ was brazenly confirmed; it also signaled to any attentive observer that the White House was more interested in appealing to the folks in Washington than to those Palestinians trapped in the West Bank and Gaza an interpretation reinforced by laying a wreath at the grave of Theodor Herzl but refusing to do so at the tomb of Yasir Arafat. This disparity of concern was further exhibited when Obama spoke of the children of Sderot in southern Israel, “the same age as my own daughters, who went to bed at night fearful that a rocket would land in their bedroom simply because of who they are and where they live.” To make such an observation without even mentioning the trauma-laden life of children on the other side of the border in Gaza who have been living for years under conditions of blockade, violent incursions, and total vulnerability year after year is to subscribe fully to the one-sided Israeli narrative as to the insecurity being experienced by the two peoples. In all these respects, Obama did nothing to change his advance publicity that the trip was undertaken with the lowest of expectations with respect to any breakthrough in the relations between the parties.
–by speaking about the possibility of peace based on the two state consensus, the old ideas, without mentioning developments that have made more and more people deeply skeptical about Israeli intentions is to lend credence to what seems more and more to be a delusionary approach to resolving the conflict. Dislodging 600,000+ armed settlers seems more than even a left leaning Israeli government would contemplate, must less the ardently pro-settler present leadership. Such a crippling obstacle to a two-state solution needs to be linked with Obama’s perverse injunction to the leaders of the Middle East, an appeal that seems willfully oblivious to the present set of circumstances makes the whole speech either hypocritical or completely out of touch: “Now’s the time for the Arab world to take steps towards normalizing relations with Israel.” How can now be the time, when just days earlier Benjamin Netanyahu announced the formation of the most right-wing, pro-settler government in the history of Israel, selecting a cabinet that is deeply dedicated to settlement expansion and resistant to the very idea of a genuine Palestinian state? It should never be forgotten that when the Palestinian Liberation Organization announced back in 1988 that it was prepared to make a sustained peace with Israel on the basis of the 1967 borders there was no reciprocal response despite more moderate Israeli leadership. By agreeing to such a self-limiting vision of self-determination, the Palestinians were making an extraordinary territorial concession that has never been reciprocated, and operationally repudiated year after year by continuous settlement building. The unilateral Palestinian concession meant accepting a state limited to 22% of historic Palestine, or less than half of what the UN had proposed in its 1947 partition plan contained in GA Resolution 181, which at the time was seen as grossly unfair to the Palestinians and an illegitimate plan put forward without taking account of the wishes of the resident population. To expect the Palestinians to be willing now to accept significantly less land than is enclosed by these 1967 borders to reach a resolution of the conflict seems highly unreasonable, and probably would not be sustainable if such a solution should be imprudently accepted by the Palestinian Authority.
–by endorsing the formula two states for two peoples the Palestinian minority in Israel was being consigned to permanent second-class citizenship without even being worthy of mention as a human rights challenge facing the democratic Israel and the whole Jewish tradition of fair play that Obama was so vocally celebrating. As David Bromwich has pointed out [“Tribalism in the Jerusalem speech”] Obama was also adopting a tribalist view of statehood that seems inconsistent with the promotion of human rights in a globalizing world. It also repudiates secularist assumptions that a legitimate state should never be exclusivist in either its religious or ethnic character. Obama went out of his to affirm the core Zionist idea of a statist homeland where every Jew has unobstructed freedom to fully embrace his or her Jewishness: “Israel is rooted not just in history and tradition, but also in a simple and profound idea: the idea that people deserve to be free in a land of their own.” And with embedded irony no mention was made of the absence of any Palestinian right of return even for those who were coerced in 1948 and again in 1967 into fleeing from homes and villages that had been family residences for countless generations. These coerced exoduses are known to the Palestinians for what they were, catastrophes, or in Arabic, the Nabka.
This regressive approach to identity and statehood espoused by Obama was also by implication misleadingly attributed to the Palestinians, being affirmed as a lesser entitlement. It is not correct to insist that the Palestinians want a state that is comparable to Israel. There is no Palestinian equivalent to Zionism. The Palestinians have no guiding ethno-religious ideology that governs their approach to self-determination. Their quest has been to recover rights under international law in the lands of their habitual residence, above all, the exercise of their inalienable right of self-determination in such a manner as to roll back the wider claims of settler colonialism that have been so grandiosely integral to the Greater Israel vision and practice of the Netanyahu government. And what of the 20% of the current population of Israel that exists under a legal regime that discriminates against them and almost by definition is a permanent consignment to second-class citizenship? Indeed, Obama’s speech was also an affront to many Israeli post-Zionists and secularists who do not embrace the idea of living in a hyper-nationalist state with pretensions of a religious endowment.
In my view, there are two conclusions to be drawn. (1) Until the rhetoric of seeing the realities of the situation through Palestinian eyes is matched by a consideration of the specifics, there is created a mistaken impression that both sides hold equally the keys to peace, and both are at fault to the same extent for being unwilling to use them. A false symmetry is presumed that overlooks the actually existing structure of domination and subjugation. (2) It is a cruel distraction to urge a resumption of negotiations when Israel clearly lacks the political will to establish a viable and independent sovereign Palestinian state within 1967 borders and in circumstances in which the West Bank has been altered by continuous settlement expansion, settler only roads, the separation wall, reinforced by overwhelming evidence that these developments will be consolidated and extended. Making matters even worse, Israel is taking many steps to ensure that Jerusalem never becomes the capital of whatever Palestinian entity eventually emerges, which is a severe affront not only to Palestinians and Arabs, but to the 1.4 billion Muslims the world over, not to mention Christians.
In retrospect, worse than speech was the whole concept of the visit. Obama should never have undertaken such a visit without an accompanying willingness to treat the Palestinian reality with at least equal dignity to that of the Israeli reality and without some indication of how to imagine a just peace based on two states for two peoples given the outrageous continuing Israeli encroachments on occupied Palestinian territory that give every indication of permanence, not to mention the non-representation and collective punishment of the Gazan population of 1.5 million. Obama made no mention of the wave of recent Palestinian hunger strikes or the degree to which Palestinians have shifted their tactics of resistance away from a reliance on armed struggle. It is perverse to heap praise on the oppressive occupier, ignore nonviolent tactics of Palestinian resistance and the surge of global solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and then hypocritically call on both peoples to move forward toward a peaceful resolution of conflict by building relations of trust with one another. Mr. Obama, on what planet are you living?
A version of this piece appeared on Richard Falk’s website 4 days ago. Falk is the special rapporteur to the U.N. on human rights in the Palestinian territories. He is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
Obama is living in the comfy bubble piped out by AIPAC, backed by Zionist donor dollars and a pro-Zionist mainstream USA media. He himself stated he was just a hack politician, that is, one who will not act for anything or anyone he is not pushed, pressured hard to support–what he did not say was any pressure group must put big donor dollars where the mouth is, and/or have a built-in, significant block of ethnic voters. But every hack politician knows this, and, as I said, he’s already identified in public, in Israel, with such characters–although he did not expressly admit to being a hack politician–anything but that; indeed his whole on-going campaign, on-going even when in highest office, is based on being the contrary to a hack, a real leader, a brave voice for real change in the 1% status quo with the chutzpah to put more than words behind his hot air. Maybe he should go chat with former congressman Baird? Does anybody know who wrote Obama’s speeches in Israel? I bet Hagel knows. Goebbels, or his mentor Bernays, would know how to do it equally well.
If you could see Palestine through my eyes, why she wouldn’t look Palestinian at all:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEhHeILa3HE
Weimar Berlin cabaret satire on the growing Nazi state. I think we need a new musical version–with minor changes in light of Zionist institutionalized cruelty for many scores of years now. Irony is magnetic, yes? And, yes, the cabaret should be located in America. After all, the rogue state Israel is a state for all Jews everywhere, those born, and yet to be born, and half the world’s Jews live in America, and America alone prevents Israel’s accountability before the World’s sense of Justice.
I am not a “1SS person”, but from my point of view it is a detail. There is no right to “self-determination”, but there is a right to equal treatment and dignity which manifestly is violated by the occupation.
2SS as “proposed” by Ross was also instructive. He “forgot” about Gaza (which Zionists basically view as a useful trash can do dispose of excess of Palestinians) and presented a map of West Bank that resembled a piece of carryon after a long feast of scavengers. 2SS makes sense if Palestinians have a viable entity and there is zero control by Israel. 2SS is predicated on the assumption that in medium term future (a generation) it is futile to expect two currently hostile groups to treat each other fairly. If so, any type of Israeli control will be exercised with enormous spite, and there are ample examples of that now.
1SS suffers from sweeping the basic contradiction under a rug: who owns what? Someone, somewhere has to decide. A court with Jewish majority will ratify all land looting that happened so far, a court with Palestinian majority will deem assorted Israeli laws and regulations as illegal. Realistically, a settlement would have to make some prior clarification.
Lastly, any solution must be imposed, negotiations between the “parties” are futile. Without sanctions on Israel on the table speeches are empty regardless of the “placement of the ball” etc. Note that there are plenty of sanctions on Palestinians already.
Name me the small country that operates independently of US, UK, EU economic influence. Take a look at how the swing vote was produced behind the scenes when the UN produced the Partition Plan, and again, when the UN was prevented from recognizing Palestine as even a partial full-fleged member state. And take a look at the history of the UN move to declare Israel an apartheid state. It’s all about zionist dollars. Follow the zionist money. Nothing has changed since Truman. Tells you what having a best business buddy who is Jewish, and a stupid conflation of biblical Israel with modern nuke-armed Israel, means in 2013, especially with dufus Hagee et al.
My own belief is that while it does no harm for one world “leader” — our glorious AIPAC-follower — to urge putting yourself in others’ shoes, it also is unlikely to do much good. Even if all the world’s leaders said it, if they merely said it and didn’t act, it would do little. Israel would wait to see if action was coming behind the words and, when it saw that there were no actions in train, it would ignore the advice. Look at 65 years of UNGA and even UNSC resolutions. All mere talk.
That is why I am not a promoter of “fairness” or other moral virtues, but a promoter of enforcement of law. My reason is this: If the nations are going to agree to some action to follow all the years of hand-wringing, they must agree on what action to take and also on a reason for acting. And enforcing well-defined law would be a lot easier to agree to than something ill-defined like “making the world a really nice place for everyone to live in.”
And, another thing.
One thing sometimes leads to another. The USA’s S/C is considering gay marriage, now, when in 2003 it merely disallowed laws against consensual gay sex..
If (a big “if”) the nations could agree to impose real and severe sanctions against Israel for the purpose (and with the effect) of ending the settlement project once for all (during occupation, of course); why, then, sputter, sputter, those nations would be so energized (assuming success and USA’s failure to prevent it) that they could later go for “democracy” or “peace treaty” or equable sharing of water, or refugees/exiles from 1948 and 1967.
But they need ONE well-defined fight, and they must win it. FIRST.
And, from Israel’s POV, it must LOSE one big fight and lose it persuasively, FIRST.