Headlines, Human Rights, Middle East & North Africa, North America | Analysis

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.