By Richard Falk
It was master-crafted as an ingratiating speech by the world’s
most important leader and the government that has most consistently
championed Israel’s
cause over the decades. Enthusiastically received by the audience of
Israeli youth, and especially by liberal Jews around the world. Despite
the venue, President Obama’s words in Jerusalem
on March 21st seemed primarily intended to clear the air somewhat in
Washington. Obama may now have a slightly better chance to succeed in
his second legacy-building presidential term despite a deeply polarized
U.S. Congress, and a struggling American economy if assessed from the
perspective of workers’ distress rather than on the basis of robust
corporate profits.
As for the speech itself, it did possess several
redeeming features. It did acknowledge that alongside Israeli security
concerns “Palestinian people’s
right of self-determination, their right to justice must also be
recognized.” This affirmation was followed by the strongest assertion of
all: “..put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their
eyes.” To consider the realities of the conflict through Palestinian
eyes is to confront the ugly realities of prolonged occupation,
annexationist settlement projects, an unlawful separation wall,
generations confined to the misery of refugee camps and exile,
second-class citizenship in Israel,
ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem, and a myriad of regulations that make
the daily life of Palestinians a narrative of humiliation and
frustration. Of course, Obama did not dare to do this. None of these
realities were specified, being left to the imagination of his audience
of Israeli youth, but at least the general injunction to see the
conflict through the eyes of the other pointed the way toward empathy
and reconciliation.
Obama also encouraged in a helpful way Israeli citizen activism on behalf of a just peace based on two states for two peoples.
A bit strangely he urged that “for the moment, put aside the plans and
process” by which this goal might be achieved, and “instead..build trust
between people.” Is this not an odd bit of advice? It seems a stretch
to stress trust when the structures and practice of occupation are for
the Palestinians unremittingly cruel, exploitative, and whittle away day
after day at the attainability of a viable Palestinian state. But this
farfetched entreaty was coupled with a more plausible plea: “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.”
There is some genuine hope to be found in these inspirational words, but
to what end given the present situation.
In my opinion the speech was deeply flawed in three fundamental respects:
–by speaking only to Israeli youth, and
not arranging a parallel talk in Ramallah to Palestinian youth, the role
of the United States
as ‘dishonest broker’ was brazenly confirmed; it also signaled that the
White House was more interested in appealing to the folks in Washington
than to those Palestinians trapped in the West Bank and Gaza,
an interpretation reinforced by laying a wreath at the grave of Theodor
Herzl but refusing to do so at the tomb of Yasir Arafat. This disparity
of concern was further exhibited when Obama spoke of the children of
Sderot in southern Israel, “the same age as my own daughters, who went
to bed at night fearful that a rocket would land in their bedroom simply
because of who they are and where they live.” To make such an
observation without even mentioning the trauma-laden life of children on
the other side of the border in Gaza who have been living for years
under conditions of blockade, violent incursions, and total
vulnerability year after year is to subscribe fully to the one-sided
Israeli narrative as to the insecurity being experienced by the two
peoples.
–by speaking about the possibility of
peace based on the two state consensus, the old ideas, without
mentioning developments that have made more and more people skeptical
about Israeli intentions is to lend credence to what seems more and more
to be a delusionary approach to resolving the conflict. Coupling this
with Obama’s perverse injunction to the leaders of the Middle East that
seems willfully oblivious to the present set of circumstances makes the
whole appeal seem out of touch: “Now’s the time for the Arab world to take steps towards normalizing relations with Israel.” How can now be the time, when just days earlier Benjamin Netanyahu
announced the formation of the most right-wing, pro-settler government
in the history of Israel, selecting a cabinet that is deeply dedicated
to settlement expansion and resistant to the very idea of a genuine
Palestinian state? It should never be forgotten that when the
Palestinian Liberation Organization announced back in 1988 that it was
prepared to make a sustained peace with Israel on the basis of the 1967
borders. By doing this, the Palestinians were making an extraordinary
territorial concession that has never been reciprocated, and
operationally repudiated by continuous settlement building. The move
meant accepting a state limited to 22% of historic Palestine, or less
than half of what the UN had proposed in its 1947 partition plan
contained in GA Resolution 181, which at the time was seen as grossly
unfair to the Palestinians and a plan put forward without taking account
of the wishes of the resident population. To expect the Palestinians to
be willing now to accept significantly less land than enclosed by these
1967 borders to reach a resolution of the conflict seems highly
unreasonable, and probably not sustainable if it should be imprudently
accepted by the Palestinian Authority.
–by endorsing the formula two states for
two peoples was consigning the Palestinian minority in Israel to
permanent second-class citizenship without even being worthy of mention
as a human rights challenge facing the democratic Israel that
Obama was celebrating. As David Bromwich has pointed out [“Tribalism in
the Jerusalem speech,”] http://mondoweiss.net/2013/03/tribalism-jerusalem-speech.html
Obama was also endorsing a tribalist view of statehood that seem
inconsistent with a globalizing world, and with secularist assumptions
that a legitimate state should never be exclusivist in either its
religious or ethnic character. Obama went out of his to affirm the core
Zionist idea of a statist homeland where all Jews can most fully embrace
their Jewishness: “Israel is rooted not just in history and tradition,
but also in a simple and profound idea: the idea that people deserve to
be free in a land of their own.” And with embedded irony no mention was
made of the absence of any Palestinian right of return even for those
who were coerced into fleeing from homes and villages that had been
family residences for countless generations.
Such a regressive approach to identity and statehood
was also by implication attributed to the Palestinians, also affirmed as
a a lesser entitlement. But this is highly misleading, a false
symmetry. The Palestinians have no guiding ethno-religious ideology that
is comparable to Zionism. Their quest has been to recover rights under
international law in the lands of their habitual residence, above all,
the exercise of their inalienable right of self-determination in such a
manner as to roll back the wider claims of settler colonialism that have
been so grandiosely integral to the Greater Israel vision and practice
of the Netanyahu government. And what of the 20% of the current
population of Israel that lives under a legal regime that discriminates
against them and almost by definition is a permanent consignment to
second-class citizenship. Indeed, Obama’s speech was also an affront to
many Israeli post-Zionists and secularists who do not affirm the idea of
living under in a hyper-nationalist state with pretensions of religious
endowments.
In my view, there are two conclusions to be drawn. (1)
Until the rhetoric of seeing the realities of the situation through
Palestinian eyes is matched by a consideration of the specifics, there
is created a misleading impression that both sides hold equally the keys
to peace, and both being at fault to the same extent for being
unwilling to use them. (2) It is a cruel distraction to urge a
resumption of negotiations when Israel clearly lacks the political will
to establish a viable and independent sovereign Palestinian state within
1967 borders and in circumstances in which the West Bank has been
altered by continuous settlement expansion, settler only roads, the
separation wall, and all the signs are suggesting that there is more of
the same to come. Making matters even worse, Israel is taking many steps
to ensure that Jerusalem never becomes the capital of whatever
Palestinian entity eventually emerges, which is a severe affront not
only to Palestinians and Arabs, but to the 1.4 billion Muslims the world
over.
In retrospect, worse than speech was the visit itself.
Obama should never have undertaken such the visit without an
accompanying willingness to treat the Palestinian reality with at least
equal dignity to that of the Israeli reality and without some indication
of how to imagine a just peace based on two states for two peoples
given the outrageous continuing Israeli encroachments on occupied
Palestinian territory that give every indication of permanence, not to
mention the non-representation and collective punishment of the Gazan
population of 1.5 million. Obama made no mention of the wave of recent
Palestinian hunger strikes or the degree to which Palestinians have
shifted their tactics of resistance away from a reliance on armed
struggle. It is perverse to heap praise on the oppressive occupier,
ignore nonviolent tactics of Palestinian resistance and the surge of
global solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and then hypocritically
call on both peoples to move forward toward peace by building relations
of trust with one another. On what planet has Mr. Obama been living?
http://richardfalk.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/what-was-wrong-with-obamas-speech-in-jerusalem/
Wednesday 27 March 2013
What Was Wrong With Obama’s Speech In Jerusalem
Posted @ 18:40
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