One man spoke to the world and the world listened.
He walked on to 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 spelt 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
millions of 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, duelling 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 worldwide "War on Terrorism".
When Obama is now uprooting this myth, he is revolutionising
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,
civilisations 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 this planet. 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 neighbours. 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,
multicultural 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 striving inexorably towards supranational, regional and worldwide
structures.
Compared with 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 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 that 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 civilisations’, 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 any more as a "terrorist
organisation" but as a part of the Palestinian people. He demanded that they
recognise 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. From now on no one can even dream about an American okay 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
talk 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.