Obama's Cairo Speech as Seen from Jerusalem

Great expectations

It was with mixed feelings that we watched President Barack Obama deliver his extraordinary speech to the Muslim and Arab worlds in Cairo yesterday.

Critics will see the speech as incredibly naive. Yet it was also the most meaningful and coherent attempt by an American leader since 9/11 to dissociate the world's 1.5 billion Muslims from demagogic elites preaching worldwide jihad and hatred of non-believers.

It is not insignificant that Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden took the president's power to persuade seriously enough to try to preempt him by issuing fresh rants. It must have galled them to see hard-line imams and Muslim Brothers listening attentively in the audience. A Gallup Poll, taken before the speech, showed 25 percent of Egyptians approving of the US under Obama, compared to 6% under George W. Bush.

IN A city where Holocaust denial is part of the popular culture, it was good to hear Obama telling Muslims: "Six million Jews were killed," and saying otherwise is "ignorant, and hateful."

To no applause, he proclaimed: America's ties with Israel are "unbreakable."

However, elsewhere, Obama's moral equivalency was disconcerting. Undeniably, Palestinians have endured dislocation - but it would have been courageous of the president to say that much of this pain has been self-inflicted, thanks to 60 years of intransigence.

He was right to remind the Arab states that their peace initiative was only "an important beginning." And we were gratified when he insisted Hamas end its violence, recognize past agreements, and accept Israel's right to exist.

But we cringed when he associated the Palestinian struggle with the US civil rights movement and with the campaign for majority rule in South Africa - even if the punch-line of this false analogy was: Terrorism is always unjustifiable.

We were braced for his reiteration of long-standing US policy against the settlement enterprise. But he missed a crucial opportunity to prepare the Arabs for territorial compromise. No Israeli government is going to pull back to the hard-to-defend 1949 Armistice Lines.

Obama didn't really need to tell Israelis to acknowledge "Palestine's" right to exist since every government since Yitzhak Rabin's has been explicit that the Jewish state does not want to rule over another people. The real question is whether a violently fragmented Palestinian polity is capable of making the necessary compromises required to close a deal.

BUT THIS speech was not largely about the Arab-Israel conflict. It was an effort to pursue public diplomacy and suasion - trying to decouple the susceptible Muslim masses from the demagogic extremists who now hold such sway. That is why the president was wise to travel first to Saudi Arabia, "where Islam began," and, just before his speech, to be seen deferentially touring a mosque in Cairo - the city from where the theology of worldwide jihad first spread its vicious tentacles.

The speech was brilliantly proleptic: first acknowledging Muslim grievances, then stating the American case. To the Israeli ear, the president sounded fawning, prefacing each mention of the Koran with "holy." But it was just the right tack given the task at hand. Similarly, as the president highlighted the epochs during which Islam was a force for enlightenment, we could not help but recall that even in that "Golden Age," Jews were still treated as a dhimmi people.

And yet, the president's harking back to periods of relative tolerance bolstered his call on today's Muslims to behave temperately. We also appreciated his defense of the region's Christian minority.

We swallowed hard as the president intoned that "Islam is not part of the problem" of worldwide terrorism. At the same time, we reminded ourselves that his goal was to convince ordinary Muslims to make this dubious statement reality.

On democracy, employing a lighter touch than his predecessor, Obama advocated for the right of all citizens everywhere to express themselves freely and to live under regimes that respect the rule of law.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei didn't wait long to digest the Obama speech before proclaiming that America remained "deeply hated" in the region, something that wasn't going to change because of "beautiful and sweet" words.

Who will be the first Muslim leader to tell the ayatollah he is wrong?
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Shabbat shalom to all.

Obama & Israel .....

Cool it!


To illustrate the nadir to which America-Israel relations have sunk, one Hebrew-language tabloid revealed that when IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi travelled to Washington several weeks back to meet with US decision-makers about the worrisome speed with which Iran is moving toward a nuclear bomb, neither Secretary of Defense Robert Gates nor Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would make time to see him.

The trip, said the paper, ended in failure.

Shocking story - but not true. Ashkenazi's visit didn't take place weeks ago, but months ago. The general chose to cut his visit short to participate in urgent cabinet deliberations about Gilad Schalit. And he wasn't in the US on official business, but to attend a Friends of the IDF fund-raiser.

Then there was The New York Times report about Washington toying with letting Israel fend for itself against the UN's built-in Muslim and Arab majority, to pressure for a settlement freeze. On Tuesday, administration sources denied the story.

There are those in America and Israel who, albeit for differing reasons, think talking-up tension in the US-Israel relationship is a good idea.

For those who want to create a political environment conducive to forcing Israeli concessions, it makes sense to spotlight differences over settlements; which is also a convenient way to dissociate the pro-Israel community in America from Israeli government policies, since support for the settlement enterprise is hardly widespread.

That's why Monday's loutish behavior by the "hilltop youth" in Samaria who attacked Palestinians, torched fields and burned tires was a godsend to proponents of a settlement freeze. Such images strengthen the myth that all settlers are wild-eyed religious fanatics to whom violence is second nature.

Meanwhile, dovish American Jews, hankering for Obama to impose "peace," are promoting a story that has White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel purportedly telling an unnamed Jewish leader that no matter what, a Palestinian state will emerge in the next four years; and that if Israel wants action on Iran, it will have to withdraw from West Bank territory.

This account portrays the savvy Emanuel as not only petulant, but naive - as if the Palestinians have no role to play, and Israel alone will bear the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran.

Playing up tensions with the Obama administration also serves the interests of Netanyahu's domestic opponents. One pundit wrote Tuesday that the US and Israel aren't heading for a collision - they've already crashed. Implication: All would be well if Tzipi Livni was premier.

Paradoxically, commentators on the Right are saying exactly the same thing: that Washington has launched an all-out diplomatic and media assault against Israel that's "worse than a crisis."

We ask them: What useful purpose does it serve to demonize so popular a president, or claim his policies are motivated by animus, when it's hard to discern where they differ substantively from those of his predecessors?

GOING into his Thursday reconciliation speech in Cairo addressed to the Arab and Muslim world, Obama has been signaling that he expects gestures from them to encourage Israeli reciprocity. To interviewers reveling in the perceived chasm between Israel and Washington, the president is saying that unlike the 24/7 news cycle, which feeds on crises, diplomacy requires patience. And as The New York Times reported yesterday, he wants to play down differences over settlements.

Obama is reportedly planning a major Washington policy address next month detailing his approach to Arab-Israel peacemaking. Those who want to manipulate the environment to Israel's detriment will continue to foster an ambiance of crisis. But those who want what's best for Israel should be working in the opposite direction.

Our government can create a better atmosphere by permanently dismantling unauthorized outposts; reiterating Israel's "no new settlements" policy, and rethinking the wisdom of refusing to endorse previous Israeli governments' policy on the two-state solution.

Can we ask Obama to honor understandings about settlement blocs reached by Israel with his predecessor when we are not honoring agreements his predecessor reached with us?

Once we have taken these steps, we can feel more comfortable about disagreeing with other Obama policies without seeming to be disagreeable.

War Siren at 11 a.m.

Welcome to our reality

Say you live in any one of these cities: Oslo, Berlin, Paris, Madrid, Amsterdam, Edinburgh, London, Stockholm or Washington, and at 11 a.m. today the war siren goes off. You've been told it's just a drill - your city isn't being attacked by ballistic missiles or long-range rockets. Your country neither plans to attack anyone, nor is there intelligence indicating it is the target of imminent attack.

Still, the wailing siren - a curiously anachronistic instrument for the 21st century - is upsetting. You do as you're told and seek out a nearby bomb shelter, or enter the reinforced-concrete room common in homes built since the 1990s.

At work, there is some gallows humor as colleagues file into the bomb shelter. At school, your children will head into the shelters with their teachers. It may strike you that the authorities were imprudent in collecting for refurbishment those cardboard boxes with their plastic shoulder-straps containing gas masks and a chemical-warfare antidote.

Of course, if you do live in any of the above-mentioned capitals, this scenario is beyond far-fetched. There are no shelters. No safe rooms. No gas masks.

No one is threatening to wipe Sweden, Germany or Scotland - or any of the others - off the map. There are no Sajil II ballistic missiles aimed your way. Your country didn't absorb 5,000 rocket hits in the course of a single summer. It doesn't share a border with a country that deploys Scud D missiles. And the notion that missiles laden with WMDs could explode over your head is simply beyond imagination.

Though Muslim extremists struck in Spain, Britain and the United States, the sense that any further danger looms is not widespread. That's why no one undergoes a security check to enter a supermarket, department store or cinema. And why armed guards are not posted outside schools.

WE ISRAELIS live in a very different reality.

That truth was brought home in remarks Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made at Sunday's cabinet meeting regarding Turning Point 3 - the week-long nationwide emergency drill.

The exercise is "routine," something the country does annually, he said, adding that it "reflects the special way in which we lead our lives - which, upon reflection, is not all that routine."

Want to understand the Israeli psyche? Consider that when our country was born, those with whom we sought to share this land rejected our right to exist. Though we have created a technologically advanced, Western-oriented country, and made peace with Egypt and Jordan, our "normality" still demands that a high-school graduate head not to university or for a gap year, but to basic training.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s (when there were no settlements and no "occupation") our homeland was under attack anyway. A single example: On March 17, 1954, gunmen ambushed an Eilat-Tel Aviv commuter bus. First they murdered the driver, then they proceeded to shoot the passengers, one by one.

In the 1970s, we fought off a surprise attack on our most solemn holy day - after having withstood a war of attrition. In the 1980s, we fought bitter wars in Lebanon to fend off attacks against our northern border.

In the 1990s, we signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian leadership. And since then? More Israelis have been murdered by terrorists than ever before.

Efforts to reach an accommodation with a violently fragmented Palestinian polity have thus far proven fruitless. The "moderates" appear no less unyielding than the fanatics.

We caught the Syrians, to our north, building a clandestine nuclear facility under North Korean tutelage. They make no secret about hosting Hamas's politburo, pressuring it to resist even a tactical timeout in its anti-Israel belligerency.

Hizbullah dominates Lebanese affairs and provides Iran with shock-troops along our border.

Then there is Iran, which may have enriched enough uranium to manufacture a nuclear bomb by year's end. Even as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens our obliteration, he insists that the Nazis did not systematically destroy European Jewry. Yet he is feted at UN forums, while Europeans shamelessly subsidize trade with his country.

That is our reality. It's the one many of us will be contemplating at 11 a.m. today, when the siren sounds.

Obama & Israel. The president takes the wrong approach

Paradigm shift

President Barack Obama says he doesn't have time to watch cable television news. We sure hope he hasn't given up reading The Washington Post, and that he made time for Jackson Diehl's remarkably illuminating column, "Abbas's Waiting Game" (May 29).

Diehl interviewed the Palestinian leader prior to his White House meeting with Obama on Thursday. The columnist, not a known Zionist apologist, labeled Mahmoud Abbas's thinking "hardline."

If the president wants to know why leaning on Israel while basically giving so-called moderate Palestinians a free ride won't advance peace, he'll find the answers in Diehl's column outlining Abbas's Five Noes: Would he negotiate with Binyamin Netanyahu without preconditions? No. Would he recognize Israel as a Jewish state? No. Would he consider territorial compromise? No. Would he compromise on refugees? No. Would he modify the Arab Peace Initiative to make it a more viable negotiating tool? Absolutely not.

Sitting next to Obama in the Oval Office, "Abu Mazen" sounded like a different man, telling reporters: "I believe that time is of the essence," and that talks with Israel needed to resume "right now."

But just the day before, Abbas told Diehl he had all the time in the world. He'll wait out Hamas (though his US-trained elite forces killed several of their gunmen in Kalkilya on Monday). He'll wait "for Israel to freeze settlements."

"Until then," Abbas candidly admitted, "in the West Bank we have a good reality... the people are living a normal life."

This from a man who claims that "time is of the essence."

Palestinian negotiators say there's no point in talking to Netanyahu because he does not want to discuss final status issues. Conveniently forgotten is the fact that when Abbas was negotiating precisely those issues with Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni in 2008, he refused to take yes for an answer and close a deal with them.

PALESTINIAN "moderates" say they'll wait patiently for Obama to force a collapse of the Netanyahu government allowing the supposedly more pliable Livni to become premier.

That's curious.

The Kadima government offered Abbas 97 percent of the West Bank (plus land swaps in Israel proper to make up the difference). Olmert was willing to concede on territory, refugees, even on Jerusalem.

Diehl: "[Abbas] confirmed that Olmert 'accepted the principle' of the 'right of return' of Palestinian refugees - something no previous Israeli prime minister had done - and offered to resettle thousands in Israel. In all, Olmert's peace offer was more generous to the Palestinians than either that of [George W.] Bush or Bill Clinton..."

Not good enough, said Abbas.

Yet now he is pushing the idea - on a willing administration - that it is Netanyahu and the settlements that are the stumbling blocks to an agreement.

US policymakers have always opposed Israel's presence beyond the Green Line. Condoleezza Rice was here only last June complaining about settlements. Still, there's no denying the disturbing change in tone emanating from Washington, which is elevating the settlements issue to an importance which is disproportionate. It's being accompanied by a paradigm shift: pressing Israel while coddling the Palestinians.

This approach is destined to leave both Israelis and Palestinians embittered and no closer to resolving the conflict.

Final borders need to be negotiated. And when they are, all settlements on the "wrong" side of the line will be dismantled - just as they were when Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. It would therefore be reasonable, in the interim, for Washington not to make an issue of modest levels of natural growth in these communities.

At the same time, a freeze within the strategic settlement blocs, including Jerusalem, that Israel intends to retain in any agreement is simply not on the agenda.

That said, the Israeli government needs to better articulate the fact that no new settlements are being authorized beyond the security barrier. And it needs to move with all deliberate speed to dismantle illegal outposts permanently.

When American decision-makers denigrate painful Israeli sacrifices - including disengagement; when they disregard the commitments of their predecessors, they are not fostering peace. Rather, they're giving mainstream Israelis cause to fear making further sacrifices.