You also had to admire the watchfulness of the White House. About thirty minutes after leaving the theatre, I got out my phone to catch up on my messages. There was one from a White House official who had noticed that I’d been “quoted” on Twitter saying that President Obama was not likely to spend any political capital in his second term to help bring about a Palestinian state. The quote was extracted from a question I had asked Rice about what might happen in the Middle East. Was a two-state solution really dead? Would the Obama Administration—with all it faced in the world—risk anything to initiate a renewed peace process?
What both Rice and the White House official made clear was that President Obama would not be bringing any plans to the Middle East on the trip that he is presently completing. But, at the same time, they both insisted that no one should jump to the conclusion that just because a two-state solution has never been more difficult, more seemingly out of reach, Obama would ignore it. The official emphasized Obama’s “strength of feeling” about the issue, and cautioned that no doors were closed.
As it turns out, Obama’s trip to Israel, Palestine, and Jordan accomplished precisely what the Administration wanted. They began by setting expectations at a minimum; “Operation Desert Schmooze” was the running joke among the press entourage. On one level, the trip was a kind of diplomatic and emotional rescue mission—an atmospheric mending of a troubled personal relationship between Obama and the Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and, more, a soothing of the sensitivities of Israelis who noted, with worry, that Obama had travelled widely in his first term—but not to Israel.
From the Palestinian point of view, a far more jaundiced and disillusioned one, Obama was, at best, signalling a reëngagement; their legitimate question is to what degree. There have been no serious talks in three years. If Obama came to the region simply to soothe Israeli feelings and to pay lip service to a peace process, this was going to be seen in Palestine as a severe disappointment at best. And for anyone looking for a real diplomatic initiative, this trip was just that: a disappointment. Obama was all embrace: no pressure, no initiative, no insistence—just as Rice and that White House official had forecast.
But the trip, for all its limitations, is worth unpacking because it is one of those events that could turn out to be deeply significant—or merely a few days of hot desert wind.
The set-piece speech on Thursday (written with particular help from his young adviser Benjamin Rhodes) was vintage Obama—deft, nuanced, broadly empathetic, a kind of mirror-image of the Cairo performance, in June, 2009, that got him a Nobel Prize for Peace. Just as he gained, in Cairo, a huge measure of sympathy in the Islamic world (at least for a while) by recognizing Arab grievances and Western mistakes, in Israel he soothed anxieties about American commitment. When Obama first came to office, a high-ranking Israeli official declared to me that Obama “has no special feeling for us.” This speech erased all such wariness.
Obama repeatedly assured his audience of its own national legitimacy, of the historical legitimacy of Zionism and the American intention to assure an Israeli future. In the same spirit, he made clear the American determination to prevent a nuclear Iran and the American aversion to Hamas, to Hezbollah, and to any other group, national or supra-national, that denies Israel’s right to exist: “Make no mistake: those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere. Today, I want to tell you—particularly the young people—that so long as there is a United States of America, Ah-tem lo lah-vad.”(“You are not alone.”)
Obama also went out of his way to show rhetorical sympathy with the broadly held notion that Israel has, under Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert, made important peace initiatives toward their Palestinian opposites only to meet with rejectionism. Agree with that or not—and it leaves out a great deal—this is a common Israeli narrative.
But beyond winning over his Israeli audience, what was Obama prepared to do about a peace process? “Peace is necessary,” he told his audience at the International Convention Center, in Jerusalem. “But peace is also just.” In diplo-speak, he was short on the “deliverables.” His harshest talk was not harsh at all. He criticized the building of settlements, but he was no longer making strict or detailed demands about halting such construction.
So what would Obama say about Palestine? I admired Ben Ehrenreich’s recent New York Times Magazine piece from the Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank—just as I have admired Lawrence Wright’s work for this magazine in Gaza, Amira Hass’s articles from the West Bank in Haaretz, Taghreed el-Khodary’s work for the Times in Gaza—precisely because that brand of reporting and writing gets at the realities of Palestinian life not through high-handed and uninformed opinion or second-hand speculation but through a keen attention to the people themselves. And so it was also good to hear Obama, after going to such lengths to demonstrate his understanding of Israeli opinion and realities, pivot and call on his audience to empathize with the day-to-day realities of Palestinians, whose “right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized”:
Put yourself in their shoes—look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home.
In a sense, this was the moment that all of the events, along with all the previous language, were headed toward—an admonition, from a President determined to be a friend, that time is not on Israel’s side, that occupation was untenable. Obama added:
Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.
The room where Obama spoke was packed mainly with liberal, sympathetic, young listeners, and they applauded him, including after the passage about Palestinian self-determination. An Israeli friend of mine, a liberal centrist who was previously inclined to see Obama as a naïve, indifferent, and untutored statesman, e-mailed me to say that I was right—that Obama may be wary of, even loathe, Netanyahu and Israel’s radical right, which prizes the ethos of the settlers, but he is sympathetic to a truly liberal form of Zionism, one that recognizes that there is no future without negotiation, settlement, and a real and just peace. Obama may be ill at ease at AIPAC conventions, but as a young man he was a natural ally to the liberal Jews of Hyde Park, where he raised his family and began his political career. It is not by accident that on this most self-consciously crafted mission he took a pass on addressing the right-leaning Knesset but will lay a wreath, this morning, on the grave of Theodor Herzl. He managed to combine support, affection, and warning in one speech and series of gestures.
Perhaps the most Obamian, and strangely overlooked, moment in the speech came when he cast doubt on the powers of politicians. This is a constant theme. Obama talks frequently about how early civil-rights leaders came to Franklin Roosevelt, asking him to take action, only to have F.D.R. reply, in essence, “make me.” Force my hand. Create a real movement.
“That’s where peace begins,” Obama said in his speech:
Not just in the plans of leaders, but in the hearts of people; not just in some carefully designed process, but in the daily connections, that sense of empathy that takes place among those who live together in this land and in this sacred city of Jerusalem. And let me say this as a politician, 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.
This suspicion of political power is worrying. If Israel and Palestine are truly left to their own devices, the likely result will be, for everyone, a grim and profoundly unsatisfying prospect—even a dangerous one. The Palestinian Authority is weak—still in conflict with Hamas in Gaza, still lacking any real initiative from Jerusalem. There is talk of a third intifada in the territories. The Israeli government, with its newly formed cabinet, is grotesquely fractured. Israel is not unaccustomed to coalition governments, but this one is an ideological Frankenstein, a weak dilapidation that ranges from Tzipi Livni, on the center-left, nominally in charge of a peace process that does not exist, to the new Defense Minister, Moshe (Bogie) Ya’alon, who opposes any halt to settlement-building, to a new Housing and Construction Minister who is a settler himself. And, making matters even more complicated, Netanyahu is shadowed by his would-be successor, Yair Lapid, a centrist secularist and cabinet minister whose passions seem most directed at a confrontation with the ultra-Orthodox rather than a peace with the Palestinians.
In other words, Obama cannot end things here. If he absents himself, if he is going to wait for a political consensus to form on its own—unaided, unprodded, unmediated—then the trip is bound to be a failure, a historical blip.
If Obama uses this trip as a first step of many in a concerted effort to persuade, to push, yes, to risk political capital in the name of a peace process, then this will have been, for all its limits, a signal moment. Obama is an attentive reader of developments and thinking in the region. He knows that the discussion, in both Israel and Palestine, often veers to despair, to talk of whether it is too late for the two-state solution—talk of whether the opportunities have been squandered, if not forever then for a generation or more. Netanyahu, for one, has proven himself willing to ride out the status quo, to make his own political survival the primary value. If Obama is a real friend, if he really does have “special feeling” for both peoples, he will not allow that status quo to persist. He will make this trip the opening act in a serious and prolonged movement toward peace. He will take the risks, again and again.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: David Remnick
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