I support President Barack Obama’s effort to reach out to the Muslim world. But as an Israeli I must protest the misguided and ahistorical statements made by the president about Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Two in particular stand out.
Obama stressed Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel. But he ignored the fact that Palestinian suffering from before 1948 is largely a result of the rejection by the Arab world of Israel’s founding and continued right to exist. Arab policies resulting from this hostility led to five wars and thousands of terror attacks.
Moreover, for peace Israel withdrew from the entire Sinai, from all Palestinian population centers as part of the Oslo process in the ’90s, from Lebanon in 2000 and from all of Gaza in 2005 — and received aggressive hostility, terror, rockets and incitement to kill Jews and Israelis in all Palestinian media and educational institutions.
Before Palestinians resorted to violence and terror in the late ’80s, there were no roadblocks, security barrier or other forms of “oppression” in the disputed territories. The suffering of the Palestinians, while real, is primarily of their own making. Particularly odious is Obama’s lack of recognition for the significant and dangerous efforts Israel makes specifically to reduce Palestinian suffering.
Second, and most appalling, Obama demonstrated an unforgivable ignorance of history, and incredible insensitivity to the victims of American discrimination and South African apartheid, when he associated Palestinians with the civil rights movement in the United States or the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.
In a loaded sentence about the need for Palestinians to cease using violence for political ends (i.e. “terrorism”), the president implied that Israel’s policies to protect its citizens, and its status in the disputed territories, is analogous to white slave-owners with whips in the American South! With all of Obama’s lofty rhetoric about his support for Israel, these repellent comparisons reveal that he has swallowed the myths propagated by those who would see Israel destroyed as a supposedly colonial, racist occupier of “Arab lands” — behind and across the 1949 armistice lines. The fact that today Jews are prevented from living, owning land, becoming citizens and even visiting (most) Arab countries demonstrates most clearly who deserves the “apartheid” label.
President Obama should have — and must now — state clearly two basic truths:
1. Israel’s founding is based on legal and historical grounds, and remains valid, no different (and arguably more deserving) than Jordan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the many other nations founded in the post-colonial period. (Contrary to Obama, the Holocaust was/is not the justification for Israel’s establishment, though it gave it additional urgency.)
2. If and when the Arab countries — their leaders and their people — are ready to live in peace with the Jewish state of Israel, there are no impediments to that peace, as Israel has amply demonstrated; America can and will stand alongside Israel, as it has done for generations, in our mutual commitment to peace among all the peoples of the region.
I have lived in Israel for 25 years, and have actively supported peace and the creation of a Palestinian state — one that would be democratic and live in peace with Israel. Mr. Obama’s remarks in Cairo have made this possibility ever more remote.
If President Obama were to have made these two statements, and demanded more directly that Palestinians and all Arabs and Muslims renounce terrorism and anti-Semitic hatred — without reference to illegitimate and insultingly misleading parallels — he could have left it at that. In fact, considering that he spent three times as long focusing on the Arab-Israeli conflict than he did on Iran, and 10 times as much as he did on Iraq, al Qaida or freedom in the Muslim world, it would have been perhaps appropriate for him to have left it at that.
He might have added, though, one caveat, based on a sad but prescient saying repeated over the past 80 years here (since the 1929 massacres of Jews by the Arabs in Hebron and elsewhere, decimating the ancient Jewish community there): “If the Arabs put down their weapons, there’d be peace in the Middle East; if the Jews put down their weapons, there’d be no Jews in the Middle East.”
Aryeh Green, director of MediaCentral (www.m-central.org) in Jerusalem, was raised in the Bay Area and is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley.