Why Israelis are cool on the Obama speech by Judea Pearl

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On the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Why Israelis are cool on the Obama speech

by Judea Pearl

18 June 2009

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LOS ANGELES - A friend asked me to explain why people in Israel, including seasoned peace activists, felt less than buoyant about Barack Obama's speech in Cairo last week.

In theory, Mr. Obama's speech has affirmed everything Israelis have ever hoped for. Peaceful coexistence and mutual acceptance with its Arab neighbours has been the ultimate dream of the Zionist movement since the Balfour declaration of 1917. So, why not embrace a landmark US presidential speech that calls for concrete steps to advance that dream?

My friend reminded me of the outburst of joy that seized the Jewish world on 29 November 1947, when the United Nations voted to partition the Biblical land into a Jewish and an Arab state of roughly equal size. There was hardly a dissenting voice then among Israelis. Half a century later, the peace offers that Ehud Barak made to Yasser Arafat in 2000 and Ehud Olmert to Abu Mazen in 2009 prove that the two-state utopia is still firmly lodged in the psyche of most Israelis. Why then weren't Israelis ecstatic over Mr. Obama's speech?

There are two main reasons.

The first stems from crossed signals that are blocking the resumption of peace talks. Palestinians view Israeli settlement construction as the litmus test for Israel's intentions vis-à-vis a future Palestinian state. Israelis view Palestinian textbooks, TV programs and sermons to be the litmus test of Palestinian intentions. A society that teaches its youngsters to negate its neighbour's legitimacy, so the argument goes, cannot be serious about respecting a peace accord as permanent.

Mr. Obama's speech, keenly recognizing the importance of emitting trust-building signals to break the stalemate, had crisp and stern words to say about Israeli settlements but hardly a word about Palestinian denial and incitement.

"The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements", the president said. "It is time for these settlements to stop." The hoped-for reciprocal sentence, "It is time for Palestinian incitements to stop", was conspicuously absent. Commentaries on Israeli TV noted disappointedly that not a single demand was addressed to the Palestinian Authority.

This has left many Israelis wondering if Obama's advisors are aware of the fierce, subterranean “battle of intentions” that has prevented the peace process from moving forward. In Israel, even the harshest opponent of the settlement movement would not support the emergence of a sovereign neighbour, rocket range away, which is unwilling to invest in education for a lasting peace. A call for a simultaneous freeze on both Israeli settlements and Palestinian incitement, clad in time tables and monitoring methods, would have invited both sides to an equal honesty test. Such a test is crucial to jump start the “new beginning” that Mr. Obama called for and, naturally, Israelis expect it to be symmetrical.

Secondly, Mr. Obama's rationale for Israel's legitimacy began with the Holocaust, not with the birthplace of Jewish history. “The aspiration for a Jewish homeland”, he said “is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied”. Who else defines Israel's legitimacy that way?

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does. Iran and the rejectionist faction of Arab intellectuals see Israel as a foreign entity to the region, hastily created to sooth European guilt over the Holocaust at the expense of the indigenous Palestinians.

Israelis consider this ideology to be a distortion of history and an assault on the core of their identity as a nation.

An affirmation of “Israel's historical right to exist”, based on a 2,000-year continuous quest to rebuild a national homeland, is what moderate forces in the region need to hear from Mr. Obama. The magic words “historical right” have the capacity to change the entire equation in the Middle East. They convey a genuine commitment to permanence, and can therefore invigorate the peace process with the openness and good will that it has been lacking thus far.

It is no wonder that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in his policy speech last Sunday, made historic recognition an axiomatic part of any peace agreement. Notably, he did not call for recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” but, rather, for “recognition of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people”.

The appeal to nationhood and peoplehood, rather than religion, amounts to an appeal for recognising the historical claims of both sides as equally indigenous, hence equally deserving a permanent status in the region.

It is now a golden opportunity for Mr. Obama to echo Mr. Netanyahu in a call for a symmetrical recognition of the historical rights of both sides. This would turn Mr.
Obama's speech in Cairo into a huge leap forward in the quest for peace and understanding in the region.

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* Mr. Pearl, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, founded in memory of his son to promote cross-cultural understanding. This is a CGNews-ME adaptation of an article that originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal and is distributed by the Common Ground News Service (CGNews) with permission from the author.

Source: Wall Street Journal, 12 June 2009, www.wsj.com
Copyright permission is granted for publication.


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