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MIDEAST: 'Lay Down Your Pain, Lay Down Your Arms'
Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler
JERUSALEM, Jun 5, 2009 (IPS) - U.S. President Barack Obama drew widespread, if in some quarters, guarded
praise from around the region as he labelled the conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians, Israelis and the Arab world the No. 2 issue (behind the extremism
of a minority of Muslims) that needs addressing if relations between the U.S.
and the Muslim world are to be changed for the better.
The praise could hardly have been otherwise, given how inspiring the
President's vision was, how deep is his commitment to securing a broad
Middle East peace; in the words of a Hamas spokesman interviewed on Al-
Jazeera television immediately after the Cairo University address, "this was as
impressive as Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech."
But alongside the praise, the landmark speech is also likely to be
disconcerting to some, to create discomfort for many Arabs and Israelis alike
- especially those unprepared to nurture the President's belief that peace is
possible, those who are moved more by their party's own exclusive demands
than by the Obama call for each side to reach out to the other.
During the so-called peace years of the 1990s between Israelis and
Palestinians, the greatest success of would-be peacemakers was to get
Arabs and Israelis, Jews and Muslims to begin to acknowledge that the other
has in fact a deep historical pain.
Recognising on one hand the pain of the Holocaust for Israelis, and on the
other, the pain of the Nakba (the Catastrophe) for Palestinians when Israel
was created was even more important than the beginnings of political
recognition by Palestinians of Israel and by Israelis of Palestinian nationhood.
That brief interlude involving the start of pain acknowledgement has,
however, receded completely during the past decade. Renewed violence has
both sides determined to inflict more pain on the other in order to assuage
their own pain.
Barack Obama did not couch his appeal for peace in precisely these terms.
But, understanding the other's pain was the message at the heart of his
speech, an appeal, and a challenge, that went in four directions
simultaneously - to Israelis, to Palestinians, to the Arab world, and to Jews
who support Israel.
U.S. support for Israel is "unshakeable", he said emphatically. Many U.S.
presidents have pledged that with equal fervour. Where Obama struck out
afresh was in emphasising not U.S. commitment to safeguarding Israel's
security (as his predecessors have done), but in his forceful affirmation of
the legitimacy of the creation of Israel in the wake of centuries of Jewish
suffering that culminated in the Holocaust.
That plea went much, much further than the customary call on Arabs to
accept the reality of Israel. It was for them, rather, to accept the right of
Israel to exist. That may be very difficult for some Arabs, and especially for
some Palestinians. Al-Jazeera's top political analyst Marwan Bishara
conceded that, saying that President Obama had on this issue "accepted the
Israeli narrative."
They will, however, be sorely challenged because of how Obama then
phrased his insistence that Israelis too must take a dramatic step towards
Palestinians - not only understand the need for Israel finally to end the
Occupation, but to recognise, as he said the U.S. does, the "pain of
dislocation" from which for decades Palestinians have suffered.
Some Israelis will balk at what they see as an equivalence between Jewish
suffering in the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering through the creation of
Israel. But, the Obama presentation was not about equivalence. It was about
finding a parallel way to the hearts of both peoples: in one dramatic sweep,
he addressed past, present and future - the pain of the past, the legitimacy
of both Palestine and Israel, and the illegitimacy of occupation.
Laying history to rest, elevating the solution onto a different plane, would,
he suggested, provide a more fruitful path towards ending the tortuous
100-year conflict over land.
He was not, however, found wanting in practical demands. He assured the
world he personally would not shy away from pressing the tangible steps
that are required to translate this intense moral pressure into a new
atmosphere and so make the effort to advance peace more relevant.
Violence, he told Hamas and Hizbullah, was not only unacceptable as a
means to achieving their goals - it does not work. They must abandon
violence completely. The onus, however, is on Israel to promote the first real
steps towards reinvigorating a peace dialogue - by ending all settlement
activity right away. Settlements, he said pointedly, were illegitimate.
The rhetoric was mightily impressive, says Israeli left-winger Yossi Sarid, a
former education minister and political activist, now a columnist. "The Cairo
speech will open the next volume of 'great speeches that have changed
history' - of that I am certain. Perhaps it will not be the speech of Barack
Obama's life - he still has two full terms in office. But it was the speech of
our lives, the lives of all the damned in the area, damned to face disaster and
death."
Any notion that the President would proffer only a moral message was
dispelled when he gave what sounded like an iron-clad commitment to
pursue peace with vigour. And, he followed that up with a veiled warning:
the U.S., he said, would be on the side of those who are on the side of
peace.
This was perhaps not the most practical peace plan that the warring Middle
East parties have been asked to confront. It is, though, the most imaginative.
As such, it may tax the rampant cynicism that pervades the region, the
disbelief that peace is possible, the belief that the gulf dividing the parties in
terms of their practical demands is unbridgeable.
The speech can be seen as but one leg in Barack Obama's quest to ignite a
peace process by means of a journey that is taking him directly from Cairo to
Europe, to the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald and to the beaches of
Normandy - a journey that calls for the transcending of pain so as build a
process of reconciliation in the Middle East.
None of the parties will be able to shrug the Obama challenge off easily. He
has laid down his marker, and he has laid down the U.S. marker. He has
made plain he means to push relentlessly a belief that the bitter present
reality can be beaten, and prove that lasting peace is not in fact an elusive
dream. (END)
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