Three More Advantages to the Cairo Speech
Not only did Barack Obama's Cairo speech amply vindicate his election and inauguration as Barack Hussein Obama against the scare-mongering of 2008; it flushed out disingenuous ideologues on both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
And -- stunningly, though so far not widely remarked - Obama made arguments against violence very much like those made here in April, thanks to the Israeli writer Gershom Gorenberg and the American writer Jonathan Schell, on the indispensability of coercive non-violence to struggles for liberation.
Obama's truths and arguments made believers in the armed-struggle, people's-liberation left squirm. But they made believers in the "This land is our land," Israel-Lobby right squirm, too. It's worth noting how.
First, though,The "Hussein" matter is quick and fun to reprise; I did it here just after the election and again on Inauguration Day, calling out the neo-con Obama-basher Daniel Pipes and others who'd tried to make the Muslim strand in Obama's identity a liability. Doing that cost them the election and the respect of 78% of Jewish voters. Calling me "an Obama acolyte," Pipes retorted, "I thought it was 'smart' to highlight Obama's having lied about his birth and childhood religious affiliation." Off goes Pipes to history's graveyard of discarded lies.
Obama flushed out ideologues of the Israel-Palestine conflict who can't reconcile some of the truths he spoke with others of the truths he spoke. But all the truths he spoke just happen to be true, and when he said, "It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true" and stated clearly what Israelis and Arabs must do, the ideologues and moralists promptly distinguished themselves by their equivocal reactions to the speech. Yes, the whole truth always hurts.
He stood before a huge, erudite Egyptian audience and said, to a still and perfect silence, "America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied." So saying, he reminded some of us that the "cultural and historical ties" of the U.S to a Jewish state in at least part of Palestine antedate the Israel lobby by about 300 years.
But does it really matter that the Puritans who settled New England were big Hebrew-speakers and named their towns biblically, or that Jefferson and Adams wanted the Great Seal of the United States to depict the Israelites leaving Egypt, or that George W. Bush's 5th-generation antecedent, the Rev. George Bush, a New England Presbyterian and the first teacher of Hebrew at New York University, wrote an exegesis of the Old Testament Book of Ezekiel in 1844 predicting the restoration of Jews to Palestine in the not-distant future, for reasons that make everyone squirm?
I'm at work on a book explaining why and how the Bush/neo-con alliance re-braided but miscarried both of the already-tangled, frayed strands of that Puritan/Hebraic rope. Obama knows all this, but many Jews to his left don't, and it's a little amusing to watch champions of multi-culturalist respect for other people's distinctive mythic depths become as uncomfortable as Obama's Muslim listeners when he described an "unbreakable" bond "based upon cultural and historical ties."
His announcement that Israel is not going away was another of those seldom-acknowledged truths that upsets the moralistic equilibrium of some in the therapeutically, disingenuously eliminationist "people's liberation" camp. Alas for them, history since 1789 shows that would-be liberators have often been as guilty of murderous folly -- even in victorious, revolutionary Paris, Moscow, or Phnom Penh -- as have the "blood and soil" nationalists of the right in Madrid or Santiago. Yet clerics of other people's violent "purity" turn smoothly away from its ugly consequences, as if they were trapped in a cold, fine-spun, unquenchable rage at their own bourgeois upbringings. Obama flushed them out by raising a standard to which they cannot rise.
I could have done with a little less of his Holocaust referencing - such as his mention of his upcoming visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp. But he soon enough turned to Palestinian oppression, rightly calling the occupation "intolerable" and asserting that "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.... It is time for these settlements to stop." Yes, other presidents have said this, but not to the whole Muslim world from Cairo, and not as unequivocally or strongly. He has put himself on the line in a way only Bill Clinton ever did, and even more so. And he was as specific on this occasion as a president should be.
This time, of course, his listeners' still and perfect silence was broken by strong applause. That was appropriate, but, to my ears, it was also predictable and less compelling than the silence with which they'd let him say the other things they also know to be true. By the time he said, "It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true," he had given the ideological spin-doctors and their useful idiots some work to do.
Finally, and amazingly, Obama said not just that "Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed." He went on to say that "For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered."
Here is what I argued here in April, in a column citing Gorenberg and Schell: "Morally as well as physically, violence in people's wars as well as by military machines is usually a dead end. As Albert Camus understood but Jean-Paul Sartre and Franz Fanon did not, those who lack the courage to think their way through this become, by default, apostles of murder.
"Schell's rendering of coercive non-violence draws not just from Gandhi but also from the even less-pacifist Hannah Arendt's understanding of the inverse relationship between violence and power: The more of the former, the less of the latter, and much sooner than many zealous young fighters of the left or the right ever seem to realize, until it's too late.
"Real power grows from voluntary consent, or it is doomed by its violent imposition, even by people's liberation movements. This is what people who get swept up in moralism aren't strong enough to understand, or brave enough to deliver on. They're not equal to practitioners of coercive non-violence who have brought down vast-national security states in India, South Africa, American Dixie, and Eastern Europe."
Some people who were uncomfortable with arguments like this in April are now uncomfortable with Obama's speech. They can't exactly dismiss it, but they can't really accept it without changing worldviews that have become dear to them for giving them their identities and marching orders. Obama is telling them that their marching orders have been wrong. Seeing this will take time, but it happened in Northern Ireland and in Germany, from which I have just returned, and to which Obama goes now.
Is it possible for you to write one article in which you're not tooting your own horn?
June 4, 2009 8:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Excuse me?
June 4, 2009 8:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Report from Mcclatchy ..in the West Bank, they've dubbed Obama
Abu Hussein
Don't tell Rush Limbaugh
June 4, 2009 9:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Unless he's got a son named Hussein that nobody has heard of, "Abu Hussein" makes absolutely no sense.
June 5, 2009 2:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you mean Ibn Hussein (but don't worry, I still won't tell Rush).
June 5, 2009 3:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think I agree with Obama and Sleeper.
Generally, violence against oppression -- even when successful -- results in the substitution of one oppressor for another -- for example, Robert Mugabe for Ian Smith.
But is South Africa a good example of non-violent revolution as Sleeper seems to imply? In the absence of ANC violence would apartheid have ended as soon as it did?
June 4, 2009 9:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen, this is an important question. Obama who cited South Africa -- along with India, Eastern Europe, and the American South -- as countries in which well-organized, deeply grounded coercive non-violence brought down powerful, armed regimes without having to defeat them militarily. In each case, though, it can be argued, there were mitigating circumstances -- the British were fatefully weak in India after WW II, and, yes, African National Congress violence arguably had softened up the regime. And the USSR was imploding because of its own internal weaknesses, along with arms-race pressures from the US.
All that said, though, the victors learned the limits or indeed futility of violent insurrection compared to massive, non-violent cooperation: When enough people simply stop obeying orders (which can happen only when they're well organized and deeply committed, with in a religious or almost-religious way), the sovereign simply ceases to have power. The key here is the relationship of power to violence, and Schell's insight, which I summarized in the relevant TPM column linked above, is that the more cooperative power people have going, the less that violent power succeeds. And the more that violence is used, the less chance there is of achieving anything like justice, even if the insurgents are victorious.
The dynamics of power and violence -- namely, that there is actually an inverse relationship between them, because power grows only through consent but is drawn down or expended through violence -- is really hard for people to grasp, the human heart being divided.
I can't do more on this right now, but I really do recommend the column I linked on this.
June 4, 2009 9:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim,
I think you are especially right on the need for tight strong organization and good leadership.
The violence is the normal reaction of the hopeless. It is especially taken on by young uneducated males who know that someone is doing them wrong, but don't see any way to stop their oppressors. The young are essentially too ignorant and immature to have the needed empathy with their enemies to counter them. All they know is to act.
That's why the organization and religion or ideology is needed. The organization leaders can provide the maturity that the young males don't have and won't have for years. It takes age and experience to realize what the long term actions and reactions of your enemies is likely to be, and to work out the effective logic outside the fog of hatred and anger. It takes the organization with its discipline to control the hotheads and educate them.
June 5, 2009 2:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
Whatever one thinks of the merits of the recommendation (or demand) that Palestinians rely only on non-violent forms of resistance, Obama's example of African-American slavery in making this point was very poorly chosen.
While it is true that violence didn't win African-Americans "full and equal rights", it is rather evident that violence won American blacks their emancipation from slavery, and secured passage of the crucial 13th and 14th constitutional amendments which were a direct consequence of Union victory in the American Civil War. Most people looking at that example are going to conclude that the war against the slaveholders was a vital first step in securing the liberties of the American slaves.
It is also unfortunate that Obama chose to represent himself as a man who doesn't understand the moral distinction between terrorism, which is illegal under international law, and other uses of armed violence, which are legally recognized as legitimate. As a result of his broad blanket dismissal of all violence, the blowing up of an old lady on a bus and the armed defense of one's home against a soldier who is stealing one's land and invading one's country were grotesquely smeared together as equally "wrong" acts or "resistance through violence and killing". That is rather demeaning to the full human rights of those Palestinians who have eschewed terrorism, and have confined their uses of violence to the exercise of their internationally sanctioned rights of self-defense against aggression.
It is one thing to recommend strongly that Palestinians forgo the exercise of their rights, and choose a path of non-violent resistance as a better strategy for achieving their goals. But it is quite another thing to suggest, erroneously and haughtily, that Palestinians don't even have those rights. They don't have a right to terrorism, i.e. the intentional use of violence against non-combatants. But they do have the right to repel invaders from their lands and homes.
To deny Palestinians have the right of armed resistance is to deny that what is happening to them is armed aggression. And that denial is a further extension of the American effort to disappear the factual and moral reality of the Palestinian experience from the historical and contemporary record.
June 4, 2009 10:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan K, I didn't hear Obama deny anyone the right of violent resistance. Nor, by the way, did Gandhi or King, neither of whom was a pacifist -- a point it seems necessary to make again and again and again.
I really urge a reading of the column I linked in the post, the one discussing Gorenberg and Schell Obama's paragraph about the inutility of violence opened a door that has been opened by several mass civil-society movements that, since India in 1947, have brought down vast, national security states with a minimum of violence. That took more courage and tighter organization than most armies require. What's interesting to me is that so many supposedly enlightened and progressive people always rush to slam that door shut.Isn't that interesting?
No one claims that it can work in all conditions; Jews couldn't have tried it against Hitler, but on this, see the column I've linked. I did not hear Obama equate those who blow up old ladies on buses with those who take up arms to defend their homes -- and, yes, we could argue about what constitutes such a defense. His point was that, in cases like this, such defenses don't work. That's why one should be very, very careful about what one is urging people to do, or applauding their doing.
True enough, the American civil-rights movement had the "luxury" of facing a polity that was at least committed to the rule of law -- and even then, it required federal marshals and sometimes direct, violent resistance. I don't imagine that Obama is naive about the difference between that and conditions in other places. But I do imagine that he understands something you seem really, really reluctant to acknowledge -- that such a movement against Israel, undertaken in the glare of international publicity and with encouragement from the US, would flummox even Israeli right wingers and nationalists.
Tell us why the Israelis would be harder to defeat than the South African whites were, or the Soviets were. Tell us why the dynamics described in the column are wrong. Tell us why Obama is being naive or disingenuous.
June 5, 2009 2:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, Obama said:
Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.
The blanket claim that resistance through violence and killing does not succeed is just factually wrong. When the Nazis invaded and occupied France, many French chose to resist trough violence and killing. With the assistance of the Allies, who applied much violence and killing of their own, the French ended the occupation and won their freedom.
The blanket claim that resistance through violence and killing is wrong flies in the face of international law and all of the moral traditions of just war thinking, and is indeed a denial of the right of violent resistance.
King and Gandhi might not have been pacifists, but Obama articulated a pacifist principle yesterday. However, his statement is hypocritical. Since Obama himself is dispatching his soldiers to bring violence and killing to bear against America's enemies in other countries, apparently he is only a pacifist when he's talking about Palestinians.
If Obama wanted only to make the much more reasonable and defensible claim that the use of violence and killing by the Palestinians, even where it has been legal and justified, has not worked and so Palestinians should try non-violent tactics instead, tactics that have worked in other cases, then he should have said that.
For some reason, Obama didn't want to draw a distinction between the wrong and illegal violence of terrorism and the legitimate and proportional strategies and tactics of a just war against aggression. One can only speculate as to why he didn't want to do this, and why he prefers to run these different forms of violence all together. Could it be that he wants to deny that the Palestinians have any legitimate right to armed resistance whatsoever, and want to stigmatize all such armed resistance by throwing it under the blown-up bus of terrorism? Does he want to reduce the entire history of armed Palestinian resistance to efforts "to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus"?
I am not at all reluctant to acknowledge that an organized campaign of non-violent resistance against the Israelis might work. It also might not work. But that's not my point.
What I am concerned about is the continuing infantilization and ideological subjugation of the Palestinians, which begins with sheer, shameless denial of the reality of what has happened to them and the predicament in which they find themselves, and ends with denying them rights possessed by all people, and treating them as brutal, irrational animals. As you know, there are many in America and Israel who believe that God, or Lord Balfour, gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and that the Palestinian Arabs therefore have no just cause for resistance whatsoever.
Obama could have taken the opportunity yesterday to define the moral situation in Palestine with more clarity. But instead he passed the buck, and resorted to euphemism and avoidance.
It will be much harder for a campaign of non-violent resistance to succeed if the most powerful nation in the world continues through its rhetoric to deny, or at least decline to acknowledge, the justice of the Palestinian resistance to aggression. All Obama seems willing to acknowledge frankly is that Palestinians have a legitimate "aspiration" for a homeland. Beyond that, his moral conception of the nature and realities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remain hidden behind a thick barrier of diplomatic weasel-words that not even Marshall, Holmes or Brandeis could interpret or disentangle.
One reason why the Israelis might be harder to defeat through non-violent means than the South Africans were is that the campaign against South Africa only finally succeeded when a global campaign of sanctions and divestment against the country took hold, isolating them diplomatically and weakening them economically. When people have tried to mount similar non-violent campaigns against Israel, they have been denounced by the "decent left". And the US government continues to run vigorous resistance against any such campaign, and will likely never permit the isolation of Israel, or allow Israel to feel the sting of non-violent global sanctions. Did anything in Obama's speech yesterday lead you to think he is at all ready to take those steps?
Obama seems to endorse the "cosmic tragedy of national aspirations" account of the Palestinian problem: we are told we have two peoples with equally just "aspirations" for a homeland and equally just claims on the same portion of land upon which they wish to build that homeland. Oh, how sad. But no campaign of non-violent resistance to occupation and colonization is likely to succeed if the cosmic tragedy account prevails diplomatically. All such campaigns depend upon the clear global grasp of a just cause, consisting in a group of people who are understood to have been wronged by having something that was rightfully theirs taken from them.
As for your mention of the Soviet Union, I struggle to understand that analogy. The Soviet Union collapsed through the weakness of its ideologically rigid economic and governing system. But an immediately precipitating cause of the collapse was a violent war of resistance in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion and occupation of their country.
June 5, 2009 8:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dan K: good points, but to say that the French Resistance overthrew the Nazis with the "assistance" of the Allies undermines your argument. Your implication is ridiculous. The Resistance had real but minor effect at best. The Allies overthrew the Nazis in France, with limited assistance of the French Resistance. Get your logic straight and make your facts authentic. Then you'll have some credibility.
June 5, 2009 11:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
NewsNag, you are overreacting. The point was that resistance through violence and killing sometimes succeeds in ending an occupation, and so it is just factually wrong to say, as Obama did, that resistance through violence and killing doesn't work. The relative proportions of French vs. Allied violence and killing involved in the liberation of France are quite besides the point.
June 5, 2009 11:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
One of the underlying assumptions of this dialogue is that the Palestinian resistance has been especially violent. This actually isn't true. Over the 60-year history of the conflict, the amount of violence actually perpetrated by Palestinians has been relatively small. This is not to deny that there has been violence--and some of it has been particularly cruel and gruesome--but overall the Palestinians have been remarkably peaceful given the circumstances. Just compare Palestine over the past 40 years of occupation with Iraq over the past six.
June 6, 2009 8:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
The wealthy Southern plantation owners knew full well the dangers of letting the slaves be educated or organized. Slavery was largely practiced in rural agricultural areas and the laws against teaching slaves to read or write were strongly enforced. The real threat to Southern slave-holders was that the slaves would somehow be organized.
The Civil War was largely fought because the Southerner kept trying to expand slavery and the rest of the nation resisted that expansion. Since justice and moral consistency was on the side of the non-slave states, the Southerners had to keep making their demands stronger and expanding further. That made Kansas and Missouri real problems for both sides. Finally the Southerners had to destroy America (secede) to protect their "peculiar institution."
I doubt that anyone considered the military incursion into the South to be anything more than the federal government putting down a few rebel bands much as had been done during Shay's Rebellion. Until that time it was a normal conflict between rulers. If anyone had imagined that it would become a Napoleonic-style war of people's armies, they would have been considered crazy. It was just the central government maintaining control of rebellious locals as every government had to do and still has to do. (currently Pakistan has the same problem.)
Of course we now know that the incursion triggered a populist uprising. That, along with the railroad, telegraph, and the industrial revolution created what we now know was the first modern war. But that was completely unanticipated. We are still working to understand what really happened. But freeing the slaves and passing the 13th and 14th constitutional amendments were very much a side effect of much larger issues. Those were just tactics to try to deal with the disaster that had engulfed the United States.
And yes, that did set up conditions that changed Southern society. But it didn't free the slaves. It only removed the laws of slavery. New segregation laws and the use of allowed but unlawful violence (i.e. the KKK) replaced the mechanisms of legal slavery. Sharecropping and the company store replaced slavery with a different but very oppressive system of control. So did sheriff's chain-gangs coupled with courts that answered to the new wealth leaders who owned the stores and conducted the share cropping. Southern police became very adept at oppressing the African American population.
All the Civil War did was to stop the expansion of slavery under the plantation owners and change the economic system so that outright slavery was illegal and not directly enforceable by law. Even that was not originally intended when the federal government quite properly headed south to put down another rebellion that was expected to be much like Shay's Rebellion or the Whiskey Rebellion.
June 5, 2009 3:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
I should add that it really was the non-violent political movements that changed the way African-Americans were treated, not the Civil War. The Civil War simply unintentionally changed a lot of the conditions, economic and legal, that the previous form of slavery had required to exist.
Those changes are not yet finished, either. What's left is best dealt with by changing hearts and minds. Violence only hardens hearts. On both sides.
June 5, 2009 3:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, it's also interesting to contemplate this statement from Obama's speech:
But it was not violence that won full and equal rights [for African-Americans]. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America's founding.
This may have worked for blacks in the United States because (1) blacks were accepted as Americans even if they were discriminated against and (2) the ideal at the center of our founding is that all of us are created equal and have certain inalienable rights. How such determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of Israel's founding would help Palestinians win full and equal rights is a mystery to me. The primary ideal at the center of Israel's founding is the need to establish a specifically Jewish state. This ideal inherently limits the ability of the non-Jewish Palestinians to achieve full equality within the Israeli state. And, in fact, Israel has found it necessary to actively exclude Palestinians from citizenship in order to achieve its founding ideal of being Jewish. So insisting on the founding ideals of the Israeli state only gets Palestinians a Jewish state. It seems to me that they already have that. So this really is just nice sounding nonsense.
June 6, 2009 8:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
One more thought: America's founding ideal is essentially inclusive. Israel's essentially exclusive. America is a state for everybody. Israel a state for Jews. If Israel shared our inclusive founding ideal then maybe Obama's prescription would make sense. In the US, Americans were forced to recognize a deep contradiction between our core belief that all men are created equal and the way we treated blacks. But in Israel, where the state is specifically dedicated to creating a Jewish homeland, the denial of fully equal status to non-Jewish Palestinians not only doesn't contradict the state's fundamental values, it may be essential to the realization of those values.
June 6, 2009 9:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's a good point. The kind of non-violent movement that is most likely to succeed on the West Bank is a non-violent resistance movement by the Jewish colonists when the time comes to move them out of Palestine. If they shoot at IDF soldiers, the soldiers probably won't have too much trouble shooting back. But if they just sit cross-legged on the ground and say, "How can a Jew do this to Jews?", the soldiers will be reduced to tears.
I don't think Palestinian non-violent resistance would have the same effect on the Israeli colonists and soldiers.
June 6, 2009 1:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
obama's speech was like a table with three legs. it was wobbly.
the missing leg was that he mentioned hamas violence towards the israeli but did not mention the recent and current israeli violence toward the gazans.
the missing leg was that he mentioned how al qaeda killed 3,000 innocent americans but did not mention all the innocent iraquis in the 100s thousand that were killed by the usa. he did not mention all the innocent killed by the us in pakistan and afghanistan.
the missing leg was that he wanted to prevent nuclear weapons in the middle east and he just kinda of hinted at israeli nukes. (still silent after all these years. who are you fooling?)
he wrapped himself, as a representative of the usa, in a blanket of innocence and he also wrapped that blanked around israel.
the missing leg made him sound wobbly and sanctimonious.
other than that the speech was good.
June 4, 2009 11:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
The original--and most powerful--use of triumphant non-violence was demonstrated, near Jerusalem, on a hill called Golgotha about two thousand years ago. From that West-bank rock came forth an anguished call for reconciliation that was heard all across the disputed land, and beyond--even to the ends of the earth.
That persistent cry, uttered in the midst of unspeakable cruelty, is proof that the instruments of human injustice and error will ultimately fail in the face of a message of transcendent love.
Perhaps our President knows this.
June 5, 2009 12:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
yes,transcendent love is the trajectory of humanity, what socrates calls the good. ultimately, all is and will be so. humanity is in the cave fighting and afraid of shadows. outside the sun shines brightly, dispelling all illusory appearances of the bondaged mind.
yes, our president knows this. that is why i am disappointed when he is not bold enough.
June 5, 2009 12:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Rabbi Hillel spoke of the golden rule long before Jesus. That is why they call it the golden rule -- all religions just about utilize it. And the Greeks. Have you ever heard of this guy called Buddha? He was 500 years before Christ:
http://www.dharma.org/ij/archives/2002a/nonviolence.htm
Anyhow, point well taken that there are some things missing in the Torah. Well I've never read it so I can't say. I've read the old testament or at least been exposed to it enough to feel that there is no golden rule in it. Nothing about forgiveness.
And yes I really do think this speaks to the root of the matter of the conflict, I am not anti semitic in any way, and can proove it even. If we are being truthful, we need to talk about forgiveness and the golden rule, regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict.
I like the stance the Prez has taken in this speech. I just hope our system can turn Obama's level headed decision making into reality -- but I remain skeptical, even with the large Dem majorities. He is a da*n good salesman, and I think he must be making an impact regarding the anti-American sentiment, some of it anyways.
I think the border should be along the green line, but I'm no expert.
June 5, 2009 12:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Interesting that Mark, the earliest gospel and firmly anti-Pharisaic (as he understood or misunderstood their teachings), did not mention the Golden Rule.
I guess he wasn't of the party of Hillel.
June 5, 2009 2:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgiveness
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethic_of_reciprocity
I stand corrected regarding forgiveness and Judaism. It seems to me the way the tit for tat military responses to terrorism that takes place with Israel is more reflective of Eye for an Eye than Forgiveness though. Not that the US and any number of nations and paramilitary groups are particularly adept at forgiveness either. But I think we all wonder how long the wackamole in Israel/Palestine will continue. Why can't Israel turn the other cheek and see how that pans out, the next time some fanatic blows themselves up around civilians or the next time an amateur hour rocket is fired blindly across the border?
It is surprising though to witness so many Americans raised in Christianity (such as myself) who think Jesus invented the golden rule (and possibly forgiveness as well.)
And come to think of it, I think the Golden Rule is a pretty accurate description of Obama's policiy positions -- in which case he can't go wrong of course.
June 5, 2009 4:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
So saying, he reminded some of us that the "cultural and historical ties" of the U.S to a Jewish state in at least part of Palestine antedate the Israel lobby by about 300 years.
That our founders recognized the connection between the Jewish people and Palestine is indisputable. But I'm not quite sure that means they would have recognized any need for a Jewish ethnocratic state in Palestine, such as modern-day Israel. Our founders' penchant for giving Hebrew names to their towns would not have been possible without the early Christians' decision to divorce Christianity from Jewish ethnicity and therefore make the Hebrew scriptures available to (or open to appropriation by) non-Jews. By making Christianity available to all pepole, the early Christians universalized a sect of Judaism. That early Christian decision to separate religion from ethnicity in some ways presages our founders' decision (however imperfectly realized) to separate government from ethnicity. The roots of the enlightement ideal of universal human rights very much stems from this Christian ideal that God's grace is open to all, that we are all chosen, as long as we accept God as our savior.
I wish I had more time to write about this, but I have to go to work--and so I leave you with two interesting letters. The first is from Moses Seixas, warden of the first synagogue in America (Touro in Rhode Island, built in the 1750s), to George Washington and the second is Washington's reply. In both, I think, one sees the true Enlightenment ideals that might make our founders less than enthusiastic about the present-day ethnocratic Israel. Of course, we also know that Washington was not fond of special relationships with any nation (I won't quote the farewell address about entangling alliances, but you can look it up), so regardless of how Washington might have felt about Israel's ethnocratic character, he probably would not have approved of our current deep involvement in the affairs of this or any other foreign nation.
__________________________
The letter from Moses Seixas to President George Washington
To the President of the United States of America.
Sir:
Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits — and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.
With pleasure we reflect on those days — those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, — shielded Your head in the day of battle: — and we rejoice to think, that the same Spirit, who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest, upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of Chief Magistrate in these States.
Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People — a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance — but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: — deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine: — This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual confidence and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven, and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good.
For all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of Men — beseeching him, that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised Land, may graciously conduct you through all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life: — And, when, like Joshua full of days and full of honour, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the Heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life, and the tree of immortality.
Done and Signed by order of the Hebrew Congregation in NewPort, Rhode Island August 17th 1790.
Moses Seixas, Warden
[edit] The letter from George Washington in response to Moses Seixas
To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island.
Gentlemen,
While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem; I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in my visit to Newport, from all classes of Citizens.
The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and happy people.
The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.
It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.
G. Washington
June 5, 2009 8:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
Very intriguing comment, Purple State! (Do you realize how much your ideas would freak out some people used to thinking of evangelicalism as the conservative other? It is indeed anti-tribal and cosmopolitan in its philosophical essence, if not always in practice. Matter of fact, history is full of stories of Christian missionaries managing to basically obliterate tribes--the co-opting of local cultural customs in order to do this is something that fascinates me to no end for some reason.)
June 6, 2009 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
In your vision of things, aren't the Gospels a sort of Englightenment prequel in a way? And dare I speak heresy on a liberal website and suggest that what you're are saying is possibly what more intellectual conservatives of past decades--like Buckley--were thinking when they said the U.S. was a "Christian nation"?
June 6, 2009 3:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
AA, I guess I'd say evangelism is something of a two-edged sword. On one side it is truly inclusive and animated by a generous impulse to share its good news with the whole world. On the other side it can be intolerant, dogmatic, and militantly crusading. The Gospels (along with The Acts and the Pauline letters) emphasize the more generous side, I think. But in actual practice, Christianity has often degenerated into intolerance. I think much of the modern evangelical movement (at least its political manifestation) very often leans toward intolerance--but, Christianity is truly a "big tent" party and there are positive flavors of evangelism as well (which, I might add, also tend to be less political).
There are many interesting comparisons and contrasts that could be made between Christianity and Judaism along these lines. Just the other day, a Jewish friend told me that what he dislikes most about Christianity is its tendency to proselytize. I semi-seriously responded that what I dislike the most about Judaism is its reluctance to do the same. There is an interesting paradox here when one compares the two religions. Christianity is often more intolerant of others than is Judaism but its also more inclusive. Judaism is rarely intolerant of others but it remains exclusive. Much of the long tension between Jews and Christians (and now Muslims who also adhere to a prostelytizing faith) may, I think, be traced to this paradox.
June 6, 2009 5:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's actually against the law in Israel for Christians to missionize there and Messianic Jews are not popular at all.
June 7, 2009 12:31 AM | Reply | Permalink
People really have trouble with the idea of coercive non-violence as an effective force. Even those who acknowledge that the Soviet Empire fell with very little violence insist that it wouldn't have imploded at all without the constant US arms-race pressure, not to mention its own internal economic impossibilities. And certainly Nelson Mandela's conversion to non-violence came only after a lot of "softening up" of South Africa's white apartheid regime by relentless violence. And the Brits left India, of course, "only" because WW II had so fatally weakened them that the were exhausted.
My answer to all of this is that there is always a compelling, self-fulfilling "logic" of violence that begets more violence. But it's not the whole story, and what amazes me is how many people want to assume that it is.
Reversing the vicious spiral --- replacing the logic of mistrust and hatred with a logic of extending trust cannily, in ways that beget trust or that "disarm" the oppressor morally even when not physically -- always requires extraordinary statesmanship and judgment, as well as deep internal organizing of the civil society that wants to shift the tactics in order to draw power away from the armed sovereign. People do that by cooperating energetically in more constructive ways even against the sovereign's commands. When enough of them do it, the tipping point approaches and power begins to slide from the regime to the new configuration.
Leaders have to pick and choose their moments in order to get any traction. And, by no means does coercive non-violence always work, or is it even always justified -- vis a vis Hitler, for example, at least after 1935 or so.
What bothers me is that armchair intellectuals in the West, like Sartre years ago, rush, for quasi-romantic reasons and out of a desire to seem valiant against disaster, to sweep away all such considerations in order to embrace the cleansing, clarifying prospects of violence from their armchairs and cafes and conference workshops.
Such people see Obama in Cairo as the velvet glove on the fist of the same old military-industrial complex, but I think he's really a step above that, and beyond them. Whether he can draw the whole American imperium along with him.... Well, no. Or, as one of my correspondents put it, it's scary how much depends on this guy. But in fact he is not alone, and what we are having here is a teachable moment.
June 5, 2009 6:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, it seems to me that you are seeing all sorts of things in Obama that just aren't there. Not only are they not there, Obama is not even pretending they are there. Obama has escalated the use of force in Afghanistan, not diminished it. He escalated the use of force in Pakistan, and then pushed the Pakistani government into escalating their operations in Swat, to the point of bringing about a massive refugee crisis and something approaching a civil war.
Obama's models are Lincoln and FDR, not Martin Luther King and Gandhi.
Yes, movements like Solidarity played a significant role in the downfall of the Soviet Union. But so did a host of other causal factors, including Afghanistan and the devastating effect of the armed Afghan resistance on the morale of the Soviet armed forces.
I do not have a romantic bone in my body about violence. This world and its endless wars and butchery disgust me on a daily basis. The stupidity and savagery and avariciousness and manic destructiveness of human beings make it barely worth caring about them. My response to the human scene is usually something like chronic revulsion and nausea. My heart doesn't throb for flags and anthems and tribes and dewy-eyed patriots. In fact, its all I can do to keep from emotionally shutting down in response to the lunatic phantasmagoria of nuclear weapons, torture, massacres, cluster bombs, phosphorous bombs, nerve gas, plane bombs, car bombs, human bombs and the other tools of atrocity that have been my experience of the political world during my lifetime.
And that's just the global affairs dimension of this blue ball of carnage we are trapped on. When people in America are not busy thinking about what foreign tribes to attack and slaughter in ever more ingenious ways, they are hoarding guns and ammo, ripping each other off, exploiting the weak and gullible, or watching people mutilate or punch each others lights out on television. I would love to step off this ball into that peaceful, paradisaical world of dreams. But I can't. I'm stuck here in the madhouse. So are you.
If you think Barack Obama, the president of the world's most potent and most active military power, is suddenly going to turn into the leader of some sort of global peace action, and transform the US imperium into the seminar leader of a teachable moment of creative peacemaking, then I think you are massively deluded, and you are going to end up being bitterly disappointed. Obama's decision to go to Cairo and reaching out with words of respect for Muslims and Muslim civilization is great, and that might help in the long run to diminish our conflicts with the Middle East, and provide a foundation for a more productive and mutually hospitable relationship with the people there. Nixon's going to China was great for the same reason. But Nixon was no Gandhi either.
And if you think Obama can end the conflict in Israel in Palestine, in a way that creates a reasonably durable outcome, just by speaking and teaching and asking, "can't we all get along?", without applying the concrete pressures Washington is capable of applying, you are similarly deluded. The momentum behind Israel's relentless colonization is so great, and the nationalistic radicalization of the Israeli armed forces, government and society so severe, that unless Obama brings some sort of forceful coercive pressure to bear, it will never stop. And if it doesn't stop, we all know where we are headed - to a Middle East war larger and more devastating than anything we have seen so far. For the sake of workable and achievable peace, and the lives of our children and grandchildren, we need people to get real, and stop putting their faith in extremely unlikely rainbow movements or savior-heroes delivering pain-free peace from the summit of Olympus.
I do believe non-violent movements can work. But I don't have much faith in the ability of a Palestinian movement of non-violent resistance to move the world to save them or to bring down the occupation by appealing to the vaunted consciences of Israelis or Americans. You know why? Because Palestinians have been getting run off their land for years, in a rather obvious and pathetic fashion, and it hasn't had much effect on the majority of Israeli and American consciences. A young American girl was literally bulldozed into the ground by the Israelis, and most Americans didn't fucking care. Serves her right, I guess, for standing between God's chosen ones and his Holy Land.
And my impression is that most Israelis are fairly contemptuous of most of the human DNA in this world that is non-Jewish. Maybe that's just a pathology born of centuries of moral trauma from the unspeakable things that were done to Jews. But there its is. So no one should count on Israeli consciences to come to the aid of Palestinians.
But neither do I think a movement of violent resistance by the Palestinians is going to work either. Nothing the Palestinians do will work, because the fact is that they are just too weak, and in this world the strong ultimately overpower the weak, again and again, unless they are countered with equal or superior strength from another quarter. The only thing that can save the Palestinians from total politicide and the completion of the long program of ethnic cleansing is forceful, concerted action by outside powers.
Maintaining peace and saving lives in the world of states and tribes, wracked by their incessant conflicts, requires both carrots and sticks, and balances of threats and rewards. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a train wreck headed toward global-scale disaster. To prevent that disaster, Obama is going to have to bring very serious pressures to bear - much more, I fear, than he yet realizes - and make some very powerful enemies and take some huge risks. And Obama will never manage to do those things unless we bring some pressure to bear on him.
June 5, 2009 10:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, When you write that I am seeing all sorts of things in Obama that are not there, and when you suggest that I think he's "suddenly going to turn into the leader of some sort of global peace action," there's something sweeping enough in the language to make me wonder what unsettles you so much about this discussion.
What I did say is that good leaders can only hope to pick and choose the right battles, the right spots that might give traction to an alternative to the self-enclosing, self-fulfilling prophecies of the military industrial complex and the national security state.
Obama is a Harvard neo-liberal and a Chicago pol by training, but also he is someone who is smarter, more thoughtful, and more steeped in the alternative logic of "community organizing" in the civil-rights tradition, and in an unusually cosmopolitan, historically informed way. I do not believe that he ran for president just to wield power within our present "free-market," "national security-state" dispensation,and lead it to new victories. I think that he is trying to play a longer, slower game, or test the prospects and parameters of it.
Don't forget that it was Ronald Reagan, of all people, who outsmarted and rebuffed his neo-con and nuclear-weapons-loving advisers in his negotiations with Gorbachev because, lo and behold, he really abhorred nuclear weapons and a lot of other things his yahoo supporters thought he loved.
Reagan was delusional and wrong-headed about so many things that I won't go further than that. My point is that Obama is a lot wiser, and that he really does see beyond the logic to which you cling. It's partly a matter of faith, not philosophy. I begin to feel that you wouldn't have done what Martin Luther King, did, either, had you been on the scene at the time, say, in 1954 and 1955. I wouldn't have, either. Sometimes, some leaders are ahead of the rest of us. ON this point, Obama is way ahead for any president..
June 6, 2009 4:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, what unsettles me is that some people are allowing themselves to be beguiled by faith-based expectations of extremely unlikely political miracles. And when those raptures fail to transpire, not only will these people be personally disappointed, their personal disappointment will once again be redirected into bitter contempt and blame for the Palestinians. They will blame the Palestinians for being merely aggrieved human beings, trying desperately to defend themselves against aggression and displacement by force, and for failing to be the singing army of non-threatening, non-violent, pleading victims that distinguishes "good people of color" from "bad people of color" in the categorical schemes of white American liberals.
I don't really blame Obama for this. I do worry that Obama doesn't yet understand the nature and sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or what he will be required to do if he is really serious about ending it. But as I said, I don't even think Obama is pretending to be the Gandhi-like deliverer you are expecting. Instead, I think you are making him a vessel for your own wishes.
June 6, 2009 9:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
There's really nothing more that one can say to you, Dan. Your closing line shows why. Anyone can read my post and the three responses I've added among the comments. I'll leave it at that and leave you to what, for a philosopher, is remarkably self-indulgent thinking that retroactively wishes away a lot of what the last 75 years have produced and have shown to those who have eyes to see. The probabilities of the alternative course that has presented itself remain so slim that "realism" such as yours is now very expensive.
June 6, 2009 5:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
It appears each of us thinks the other is dangerous. Fair enough. Thanks for the discussion, Jim.
June 6, 2009 5:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
My goodness, what a reaction from Cafe.
I really enjoyed this take today. Fun to take a couple days and rethink something as grand as that speech.
I know that Clinton was a good speaker as President.
w did not give a damn. I mean besides being a horrible speaker, he certainly did not invest in very good speech writers.
This New Guy we have...We have needed this for soooo long.
More than a few blogs and comments ripping President Obama's take on the Israeli/Palestinian situation.
I just did not see it that way. Thank you for this.
June 6, 2009 6:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Our President walks softly, but I'd bet he's beginning to understand the power of that big stick he carries.
June 7, 2009 9:37 AM | Reply | Permalink