Obama's speech

Ok, 4 days late, here's my response to Obama's speech in Cairo.

I liked it.

OK, so no news flash there, I guess.

I am completely supportive of Obama's focus on stopping the growth of settlements. Settlements and the continued growth thereof are the number 1 impediment to progess coming from the Israeli side. Continued land expropriations, Israel-only infrastructure (such as highways) and onerous "security measures" (such as roadblocks and checkpoints) make the lives of Palestinians unnecessarily difficult, as Obama rightly pointed out. Plus, they are supported by the most radical, theocratic and anti-democratic elements in the Israeli polity, people who should be arreseted for incitement, not coddled and given tax incentives.

There's a strain of thinking on the hardcore pro-Israel side that believes Obama is selling Israel down the river. I don't buy this one bit. The man who got on stage in Cairo and said the following to the Arab and Moslem world:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

is not selling out Israel, its legitimate aspirations or its legitimate security needs. Focus on the word "legitimate."

When the Deputy General Counsel from Chicago was here last year, I asked him why Israel was not living up to its obligations under the Road Map to dismantle settlement outposts and stop the growth of the main settlements. He said, We won't do anything unilaterally - if they don't live up to their commitments, we won't live up to ours. I think this is counterproductive, but in any case, stopping settlement activities does not and should not depend on a final peace agreement. Israel's security needs should be defined as being within Israel proper, or at least inside the borders of the security fence. The idea of building a separation barrier and then continuing to build settlement infrastructure on the Palestinian side of that barrier is a stick in the eye to everyone, Arab or Israeli, who wants this conflict to come to an eventual conclusion.

I asked my friend Richard what the mood was in Israel in the aftermath of the speech, and he said that there was a lot of surprise that Obama and Netanyahu seem so determined to be on a collision course. I never would have thought that Obama would have taken on the settlements so directly, as that is the very thing that ruined the relationship between the OJC and Bush I, but he has proven himself once again to be a better political strategist than I. Settlement construction has been understood to be a violation for years by administrations and congressional leaderships of both parties, and stopping it is an undertaking that Israel itself has made numerous times; despite all the winking and procrastination that has gone on on the subject, few congressmen, or Jewish communal organizations for that matter, are going to go out on a limb for the sake of it.

Now the Israelis are saying there were oral agreements between Bush II and Sharon that "natural growth" in settlements was to be allowed, but "Bush said we could" is unlikely to be very persuasive to this administration, not only in the absense of written understandings to that effect, but in the presence of repeated written understandings to the opposite effect.

It'll be interesting to see who blinks first. I bet it will be Bibi, and it may cost him his coalition. Goldberg thinks that's what Obama wants, but I don't think he's that Machiavellian. I think he'll be happy to work with whoever's there, as long as they are willing to stop settlement expansion. Of course, no Arab state is going to sign an agreement with the egregious Lieberman, and none of Bibi's coalition partners, with the possible exception of Barak, give a fig about the Americans, the Palestinians or anybody else, so a little coalition shakeup is probably going to be necessary.

Part of my job description is speaking on behalf of Israel in public forums, and I can't even tell you how hard that has been over the past few months, in the aftermath of Gaza and the elections of the Israeli version of the nutters. If Obama is able to bring Israel back to its senses, put it on the path of reasonable coexistence with its neighbors and away from its (largely self-imposed) Samson posture, then he will be doing me - as well as Israel - a big favor.