Having watched TV half the day, I can say with assurance that the symbolic meaning of Obama's elevation is too large to be contained by any policy pronouncement or interpretation. Which is making me optimistic re Israel/Palestine. President Obama's mere presence is sending shockwaves through the culture. The repeated insistence today by white commentators that America is finally dealing with its "original sin"–slavery, racism–and the repeated invocations of the Emancipation Proclamation are just too profound not to have a big effect on our politics and the politics of the Middle East.
I noticed that when Tom Brokaw was talking about segregation in the south today he called it "apartheid."
The beauty of his comment was the understanding that "apartheid" is not limited to the legal system of South Africa. It is applicable to any situation in which one group has privileged legal rights over another. There is apartheid on the West Bank. How Americans can destroy apartheid here over 40 years of struggle and ignore it when it exists at our behest in the Middle East–this is simply unsupportable. The Israel lobby cannot last.
On a not-very-related noted, today on Brian Lehrer's show on WNYC in New York he interviewed sociologist Amitai Etzioni whom he described as the founder of the "communitarian movement" in the United States. Etzioni then said that Obama represented the triumph of the idea of community over particularism. And proceeded to gush over the fact that Obama's election
was like the fall of apartheid in South Africa and a couple other great democratic advances in the west I now forget. Lehrer said that Etzioni "happened to be" in Israel for the interview. Well, actually, Etzioni is an Israeli-American. And I'm sure that Etzioni is bien-pensant re that promised Palestinian state, some where over the rainbow. As Lehrer is. But I found it unsettling to have an Israeli-American guy with a foreign accent chattering from Israel about community and minority just after Israel killed 1300 Arabs and destroyed just about every important structure in Gaza. Lehrer would never give this place to a Chinese guy without questioning him about China's human-rights record. It reflects once again the entrenchment of Israel-forgiving ideas in the liberal mainstream. (Phil Weiss)
