David Bromwich writes:
President Obama in his Cairo speech mentioned and named the "unprecedented Holocaust" suffered by European Jews in the years 1933-1945. He also mentioned the sufferings of Palestinians, from the dispossession of 1948 to the life under occupation that continues today. He clearly evoked these afflictions as instances of human suffering for which all are responsible who permit them to occur. He suggested no comparison between the two, in kind or in degree. The resemblance lay rather in the fact of suffering itself. Where it could have been prevented, it was not prevented. Where it can now be stopped, it has not yet been stopped.
Some Israelis, strongly identified with the anti-two state policy of Binyamin Netanyahu, have seized on the idea that Obama was asserting a false "moral equivalence" between Jewish and Palestinian sufferings. And many of their American allies–including the large remnant of the neoconservatives still honored in the mass media–have taken up the cry. The placement of the word Palestinian beside the word Jew in the context of human suffering is supposed to be a calculated insult or a sign of defective judgment. Paul Wolfowitz and David Brooks, for example, took this line in the New York Times today–Brooks in his column, Wolfowitz in an "expert" comment cited in a news article.
The attack will go on. The war party in the Middle East are searching for the weak point in an important and courageous speech by an American president on foreign soil. With "moral equivalence," they think they have found it. And they are fortified in that assumption by memories of the success of the attack on Jimmy Carter for his supposed assertion of moral equivalence between the wrongs committed by the United States and the wrongs committed by Soviet Russia. The slander, they recall, worked then. May it not work now?
We will have to say this again and again: nothing is the moral equivalent of anything else. Jewish suffering in the mid-twentieth century was without parallel, and was inflicted with a premeditation that has no parallel. It is in the past but it should matter to us in the present. Palestinian suffering is in the present; and something can be done about it by people who are alive. Memory of the former is not an excuse for failure to remedy the latter. Indeed, the more vivid the memory is, the harder it presses on us now to avert the visiting of a catastrophe of any size or scale on any people at all.
