Obama's
Cairo speech - a masterpiece!
by
Uri Avnery
Israeli peace activist and former Knesset member,
Uri Avnery, sees President Obama's
Cairo speech as a
moment of deep historical significance and calls the address
"The masterpiece
of a man bringing a new message to the world."
One
man spoke to the world, and the world listened.
He
walked onto the stage in Cairo, alone, without hosts
and without
aides, and delivered a sermon to an audience of billions. Egyptians and
Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, Sunnis and
Shiites, Copts and Maronites – and they all listened attentively.
He
unfolded before them the map of a new world, a
different world,
whose values and laws he spelled out in simple and clear language - a
mixture of idealism and practical politics, vision and pragmatism.
Barack
Hussein Obama – as he took pains to call himself
– is the
most powerful man on earth. Every word he utters is a political fact.
“A HISTORIC SPEECH”,
pronounced commentators in a
hundred languages. I prefer another adjective:
The
speech was right.
Every
word was in its place, every sentence precise,
every tone in
harmony. The masterpiece of a man bringing a new message to the world.
From
the very first word, every listener in the hall and
in the
world felt the honesty of the man, that his heart and his tongue were
in harmony, that this is not a politician of the old familiar sort –
hypocritical, sanctimonious, calculating. His body language was
speaking, and so were his facial expressions.
That’s
why the speech was so important. The new moral
integrity and
the sense of honesty increased the impact of the revolutionary content.
And
a revolutionary speech it certainly was.
In
55 minutes, it not only wiped away the eight years of
George W.
Bush, but also much of the preceding decades, from World War II on.
The
American ship has turned – not with the sluggishness
everyone would have expected, but with the agility of a speedboat.
That
is much more than a political change. It touches
the roots of
the American national consciousness. The President spoke to hundreds of
million US citizens no less than to a billion Muslims.
The
American culture is based on the myth of the Wild
West, with its
Good Guys and Bad Guys, violent justice, dueling under the midday sun.
Since the American nation is composed of immigrants from all over the
world, its unity seems to require a threatening, world-encompassing
evil enemy, like the Nazis and the Japs, or the Commies. After the
collapse of the Soviet empire, this role was taken over by Islam.
Cruel,
fanatical, bloodthirsty Islam; Islam as the
religion of
murder and destruction; an Islam lusting for the blood of women and
children. This enemy captured the imagination of the masses and
supplied material for television and cinema. It provided lecture topics
for learned professors and fresh inspiration for popular writers. The
White House was occupied by a moron who declared a world-wide “War on
Terrorism”.
When
Obama is now uprooting this myth, he is
revolutionizing
American culture. He wipes away the picture of one enemy, without
painting another in its place. He preaches against the violent,
adversary attitude itself, and starts to work to replace it with a
culture of partnership between nations, civilizations and religions.
I
see Obama as the first great messenger of the 21st
century. He is
the son of a new era, where the economy is global and the whole of
humanity faces the danger to the very existence of life on the planet
Earth. An era where the Internet connects a boy in New Zealand with a
girl in Namibia in real time, where a disease in a small Mexican
village spreads all over the globe within days.
This
world needs a world law, a world order, a world
democracy.
That’s why this speech really was historic: Obama outlined the basic
contours of a world constitution.
While
Obama proclaims the 21st century, the government
of Israel is returning to the 19th.
That
was the century when a narrow, egocentric,
aggressive
nationalism took root in many countries. A century that sanctified the
belligerent nation which oppresses minorities and subdues neighbors.
The century that gave birth to modern anti-Semitism and to its response
– modern Zionism.
Obama’s
vision is not anti-national. He spoke with pride
about the
American nation. But his nationalism is of another sort: an inclusive,
multi-cultural and non-sexist nationalism, which includes all the
citizens of a country and respects other nations.
This
is the nationalism of the 21st century, which is
inexorably
striving towards supranational, regional and world-wide structures.
Compared
to this, how miserable is the mental world of
the Israeli
Right! How miserable is the violent, fanatical-religious world of the
settlers, the chauvinist ghetto of Netanyahu, Lieberman and Barak, the
racist-fascist closed-in world of their Kahanist allies!
One
has to understand this moral and spiritual dimension
of Obama’s
speech before considering its political implications. Not only in the
political sphere are Obama and Netanyahu on a collision course. The
underlying collision is between two mental worlds which are as distinct
from each other as the sun and the moon.
In
Obama’s mental world, there is no place for the
Israeli Right or
its equivalents elsewhere. Not for their terminology, not for their
“values”,
and still less for their actions.
IN
THE political sphere, too, a huge gap has opened up
between the governments of Israel and the USA.
During
the last few years, successive Israeli
governments have
ridden the wave of Islamophobia that has spread throughout the West.
The Islamic world was considered the deadly enemy, America was
galloping grimly towards the Clash of Civilizations, every Muslim was a
potential terrorist.
Israel’s
right-wing leaders could rejoice. After all,
the
Palestinians are Arabs, the Arabs are Muslims, the Muslims are
Terrorists – so that Israel was assured a central place in the war of
the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.
That
was a Garden of Eden for racist demagogues. Avigdor
Lieberman
could advocate the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel, Ellie Yishai
could enact laws for the revocation of the citizenship of non-Jews.
Obscure Members of the Knesset could grab headlines with bills that
might have been conceived in Nuremberg.
This
Garden of Eden is no more. Whether the implications
will become
clear quickly or slowly - the direction is obvious. If we continue on
our path, we will become a leper colony.
The
Tone makes the music – and this applies also to the
President’s
words on Israel and Palestine. He spoke at length about the Holocaust –
honest and courageous words, full of empathy and compassion, which were
received by the Egyptians in silence but with respect. He stressed
Israel’s right to exist. And without pausing, he spoke about the
suffering of the Palestinian refugees, the intolerable situation of the
Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own.
He
spoke respectfully about Hamas. Not anymore as a
“terrorist
organization”, but as a part of the Palestinian people. He demanded
that they recognize Israel and stop violence, but also hinted that he
would welcome a Palestinian unity government.
The
political message was clear and unequivocal: the
Two-State
Solution will be put into practice. He himself will see to that.
Settlement activity must cease. Unlike his predecessors, he did not
stop at speaking about “Palestinians”, but uttered the decisive word:
“Palestine” – the name of a state and a territory.
And
no less important: the Iran war has been struck from
the agenda.
The dialogue with Tehran, as a part of the new world, is not limited in
time. As from now, no one can even dream about an American OK for an
Israeli attack.
How
did official Israel respond? The first reaction was
denial. “An
unimportant speech”. “There
was nothing new”. The establishment
commentators picked out a few pro-Israeli sentences from the text and
ignored all the others. And after all, “these are just words. So he
talked. Nothing will come out of it.”
That
is nonsense. The words of the President of the
United States
are more than just words. They are political facts. They change the
perceptions of hundreds of millions. The Muslim public listened. The
American public listened. It may take some time for the message to sink
in. But after this speech, the pro-Israel lobby will never be the same
as it was before. The era of “foile
shtik” (Yiddish for sneaky tricks)
is over. The sly dishonesty of a Shimon Peres, the guileful deceits of
an Ehud Olmert, the sweet talking of a Bibi Netanyahu – all these
belong to the past.
The
Israeli people must now decide: whether to follow
the right-wing
government towards an inevitable collision with Washington, as the Jews
did 1940 years ago when they followed the Zealots into a suicidal war
on Rome – or to join Obama’s march towards a new world.
first
published as "The
Tone and the Music" on the Gush-Shalom website.
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