Obama visiting the Sphinx last week. His message to the Muslim world was one of respect and realism
The American president’s Cairo speech is the obvious blueprint for peace in the Middle East region
It is sometimes easy to forget the sheer bizarreness of what happened in Cairo and Riyadh last week. Then the White House transcript of an international press interview brings it home. An Indonesian journalist, after asking why the president didn’t make his speech in that vast Muslim south Asian country, followed up with this:
Q: Actually I live only 300 metres from your old house.
President Obama: Is that right?
Q: Yes, Menteng Dalam.
President Obama: Except now it’s all paved.
Q: Yes, it’s all paved.
President Obama: Yes, see, when I was there it was all dirt, so when the rains came it would all be mud. And all the cars would get stuck.
How many previous American presidents addressing the masses in the developing world have been able to say that? The last presidents to break through in this global fashion — Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy — represented American glamour and style and otherness. Barack Obama does, too — but he combines it with a unique developing-world biography. It’s this tension that many of us believed was a huge asset for the West in defusing the clash of civilisations with Islam.
It’s that biography that made a speech that echoed some of George W Bush’s themes reach a critical mass of credibility. But in many respects this was not a speech, as traditionally understood. It was an intervention.
The Middle East is addicted to its past; Obama spoke of the need to move into the future. The Middle East is fixated on conflict and identity; Obama emphasised quotidian common interests. The Middle East loves quibbles; Obama landed slap-bang in the middle of most of them and refused to budge. And driving all of it was a critical question of tone — a measured, careful and stern message of respect and realism.
The obvious critique that this was just a set of words seems to me to miss the point. An intervention begins with words because it requires the actions of others. You don’t get an addict to go into recovery by cuffing him and throwing him into an ambulance. You talk to him and his family and speak calmly about what everyone in the room knows to be true but no one will face. So, for me, the core sentence of the speech was obvious: “It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.”
We all know that jihadism is not Islam; but we also know that jihadism is not alien to Islam and needs to be confronted, not engaged. We all know that the only solution to Israel/Palestine is a two-state partition; and we also know that Palestinian terrorism and Israeli settlements on occupied land need to be stopped. We all know that Iran has every right to peaceful nuclear energy; equally we know that Israel has every right to demand real and reliable assurances that such technology will not be directed at exterminating the Jewish state. For Obama to state this so plainly, so simply and so urgently as the first item of business in his foreign policy is a remarkable thing. He is doing with the Middle East what he did with America: if he explains it all clearly enough, maybe some actions will be taken.
Q: Actually I live only 300 metres from your old house.
President Obama: Is that right?
Q: Yes, Menteng Dalam.
President Obama: Except now it’s all paved.
Q: Yes, it’s all paved.
President Obama: Yes, see, when I was there it was all dirt, so when the rains came it would all be mud. And all the cars would get stuck.
How many previous American presidents addressing the masses in the developing world have been able to say that? The last presidents to break through in this global fashion — Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy — represented American glamour and style and otherness. Barack Obama does, too — but he combines it with a unique developing-world biography. It’s this tension that many of us believed was a huge asset for the West in defusing the clash of civilisations with Islam.
It’s that biography that made a speech that echoed some of George W Bush’s themes reach a critical mass of credibility. But in many respects this was not a speech, as traditionally understood. It was an intervention.
The Middle East is addicted to its past; Obama spoke of the need to move into the future. The Middle East is fixated on conflict and identity; Obama emphasised quotidian common interests. The Middle East loves quibbles; Obama landed slap-bang in the middle of most of them and refused to budge. And driving all of it was a critical question of tone — a measured, careful and stern message of respect and realism.
The obvious critique that this was just a set of words seems to me to miss the point. An intervention begins with words because it requires the actions of others. You don’t get an addict to go into recovery by cuffing him and throwing him into an ambulance. You talk to him and his family and speak calmly about what everyone in the room knows to be true but no one will face. So, for me, the core sentence of the speech was obvious: “It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.”
We all know that jihadism is not Islam; but we also know that jihadism is not alien to Islam and needs to be confronted, not engaged. We all know that the only solution to Israel/Palestine is a two-state partition; and we also know that Palestinian terrorism and Israeli settlements on occupied land need to be stopped. We all know that Iran has every right to peaceful nuclear energy; equally we know that Israel has every right to demand real and reliable assurances that such technology will not be directed at exterminating the Jewish state. For Obama to state this so plainly, so simply and so urgently as the first item of business in his foreign policy is a remarkable thing. He is doing with the Middle East what he did with America: if he explains it all clearly enough, maybe some actions will be taken.
Where does this start? For the purposes of this trip it started with the Obama administration proving its good faith — by drawing a firm line against all expansion in illegal Israeli settlements on the West Bank. At first much of Washington assumed this was familiar boilerplate, not seriously meant. But Binyamin Netanyahu discovered on his recent trip to Washington, to his evident shock, that Obama actually meant it.
Not only that but according to Haaretz, the Israeli paper, the leading lights in Congress were on board as well: “ ‘Even the most conservative institutions of Jewish American life don’t want to go to war over settlement policy,’ said David Twersky, who was until recently the senior adviser on international affairs at the American Jewish Congress. ‘They might say the administration is making too much of a big deal of it, but they will not argue that Jews have the right to settle all parts of Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel]’.”
Whether this realism lasts is a big question. Neoconservatives are up in arms that anything be asked of Israel before Iran is confronted. But Obama seems to understand that for the United States to be taken seriously in the region, it needs to demonstrate early on that it is prepared to be more even-handed than in its recent history. Acknowledging Palestinians’ suffering and grief over their displacement from what they once saw as their own country is a prerequisite for attempting to engage those who wield real power in the region.
Of course, if Obama is bluffing, his bluff will be called. But he does have leverage over the Netanyahu government — the United Nations veto, military aid — and, simply by gesturing gently towards it, he may make a new realism take hold in Jerusalem. Left to its own devices, without a regional deal, Israel faces a bleak future in which demographics force it to leave Judea and Samaria without security or to become a minority Jewish country that operates on an apartheid model. No one can want that. It is hard to see Israel surviving past my lifetime unless it adjusts swiftly, with help and support from its friends.
When you see how many delicate balancing acts are required to pull the grand bargain off in the region, scepticism is entirely justified. But I don’t believe Obama is naive about the difficulty of the task. He knows that unless a real attempt is made to avert peacefully a catastrophic nuclear arms race in the region, to save the Israelis and Palestinians from themselves and to reconstitute the image of America in the psyches of a vast young generation of Muslims, we face a darkness that could spread very fast globally and engulf us all.
There are a lot of constantly shifting balls in play — the Iranian electorate, the Syrian elite, the US Congress, the Iraqi military, the Israeli governing coalition. Each one could derail everything on its own. Yet this young president presses forward with the kind of self-confidence and assurance not seen in the region in decades. He knows, I sense, that even if he fails, the message of Cairo will endure in the minds of many young Muslims for much of their lives. Mere words? So were Reagan’s and Kennedy's.
Perhaps the fruit of those words — of that respect and engagement — won’t be felt for another generation or so. That merely underlines why they matter and how vast Obama’s ambition truly is.
Not only that but according to Haaretz, the Israeli paper, the leading lights in Congress were on board as well: “ ‘Even the most conservative institutions of Jewish American life don’t want to go to war over settlement policy,’ said David Twersky, who was until recently the senior adviser on international affairs at the American Jewish Congress. ‘They might say the administration is making too much of a big deal of it, but they will not argue that Jews have the right to settle all parts of Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel]’.”
Whether this realism lasts is a big question. Neoconservatives are up in arms that anything be asked of Israel before Iran is confronted. But Obama seems to understand that for the United States to be taken seriously in the region, it needs to demonstrate early on that it is prepared to be more even-handed than in its recent history. Acknowledging Palestinians’ suffering and grief over their displacement from what they once saw as their own country is a prerequisite for attempting to engage those who wield real power in the region.
Of course, if Obama is bluffing, his bluff will be called. But he does have leverage over the Netanyahu government — the United Nations veto, military aid — and, simply by gesturing gently towards it, he may make a new realism take hold in Jerusalem. Left to its own devices, without a regional deal, Israel faces a bleak future in which demographics force it to leave Judea and Samaria without security or to become a minority Jewish country that operates on an apartheid model. No one can want that. It is hard to see Israel surviving past my lifetime unless it adjusts swiftly, with help and support from its friends.
When you see how many delicate balancing acts are required to pull the grand bargain off in the region, scepticism is entirely justified. But I don’t believe Obama is naive about the difficulty of the task. He knows that unless a real attempt is made to avert peacefully a catastrophic nuclear arms race in the region, to save the Israelis and Palestinians from themselves and to reconstitute the image of America in the psyches of a vast young generation of Muslims, we face a darkness that could spread very fast globally and engulf us all.
There are a lot of constantly shifting balls in play — the Iranian electorate, the Syrian elite, the US Congress, the Iraqi military, the Israeli governing coalition. Each one could derail everything on its own. Yet this young president presses forward with the kind of self-confidence and assurance not seen in the region in decades. He knows, I sense, that even if he fails, the message of Cairo will endure in the minds of many young Muslims for much of their lives. Mere words? So were Reagan’s and Kennedy's.
Perhaps the fruit of those words — of that respect and engagement — won’t be felt for another generation or so. That merely underlines why they matter and how vast Obama’s ambition truly is.
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