Don't Be Naïve. That Speech Was a Revolution

[babylonsister]

http://prospect.org/article/dont-be-na%C3%AFve-speech-was-revolution

Don't Be Naïve. That Speech Was a Revolution

Gershom Gorenberg

March 25, 2013

Obama told Israelis last week that the occupation is destroying their country's future.


flickr/AJstream

Barack Obama acknowledges the crowd after his speech last week at the Jerusalem Convention Center.


After a couple of days for careful reflection, it's clear: Barack Obama gave an amazing speech. The president of the United States stood in a hall in Jerusalem, and with empathy and with bluntness that has been absent for so long we forgot it could exist, told Israelis: The occupation can't go on. It's destroying your own future. And besides that, Palestinians have "a right to … justice" and "to be a free people in their own land."

If you don't think this is a breakthrough, you are letting naïve pessimism overcome realism. Yes, it's true that one speech will be worth nothing if not followed by intense American diplomacy. That comment has become banal. A realistic assessment is that Obama's visit, and the speech, were the opening act of an American diplomatic effort—a near perfect opening.

The first breakthrough was in method: Obama started by negotiating with the Israeli public. The choice of venue, an auditorium full of university students rather than the Knesset, was not a glitch, as many people thought beforehand. The venue was the message: The politicians have been too slow, so I'm stepping around them to talk to normal Israelis first.

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Yet even the first piece of the speech wasn't quite the shmaltz it seemed to be. Obama told Israelis that he understood their fears. That was necessary before challenging the fears. But when he said in Hebrew, "You're not alone," he was not just offering support. He was directly challenging the narrative of fear on which Benjamin Netanyahu's politics are built. "Chill," Obama was saying. "It's not 1938. You are not about to be wiped off the map." And therefore, he was saying, you can consider the internal threats to Israel's future, the damage done by occupation, and you can make peace.

The most direct, powerful part of the speech was when Obama said that the Palestinians' "right to justice must also be recognized," when he told Israelis that settlement, and roadblocks, and settler violence are unjust. No American president has dared state that stark message before an Israeli audience before—or before an American one. To underline it, he borrowed the line, "to be a free people in our land," directly from the Israeli national anthem. "Palestinians," he said, "have a right to be a free people in their land." The words that define your story of yourselves, that move you even when you are tired of them and think they are kitsch, Obama suggested to Israelis, are the words that should help you empathize with Palestinians.

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One speech doesn't make a peace process. But as the beginning of a process, this speech was a revolution.