Tikkun Magazine, July/August 2009

Obama in Cairo

by Mark LeVine

Near the start of his much-anticipated June 4 speech to the Muslim world, President Barack Obama described himself as "a student of history"; by the end it was clear that the student needs to get back to the classroom.

For all its well-intentioned rhetoric, President Obama's speech was, sadly, conceptually flawed, empirically challenged, and politically blind to the daily realities that drive hundreds of millions of Muslims to increasing despair.

Conceptually, the president's goal was clearly to help correct the mistaken notion shared by so many Muslims and Americans of an essential conflict between them. He even spoke of Islam, rightly, as being "always part of America."

But such rhetoric was overshadowed by the use of language and themes that hew closely to the long-held notion of "Islam" and the "West" as being two essentially different civilizations traveling on separate historical trajectories.

To bridge the rift between them, Obama had first to establish a deep, centuries-long tension driven by "historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate." Islam "carried the light of learning" and "paved the way" for modernity and globalization, but it did not participate directly in their birth or development. Instead, modernity and the "sweeping change" it brought "led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam."

This idea of modern processes forcing their way into hostile Muslim territory is belied by the historical record, which reveals a deep participation of the Muslim world, and other non-Western regions, in the emergence and spread of modernity.

However inaccurate, this dualism serves an important rhetorical function in the president's larger argument. With a gap so wide, he can rightly argue that "change cannot happen overnight." Indeed, before the speech, Senior Adviser David Axelrod explained that the breach would likely take more than one administration to heal.

In fact, change could happen overnight. Moreover, the policies necessary to achieve it are simple and easily implemented-precisely because the citizens of the Muslim-majority world and the United States share so many of the same values when it comes to respect for democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. But change will only happen if President Obama takes seriously what most Muslims have long said, not merely "behind closed doors," but in the open to anyone who will listen.

Here I'm reminded of President Reagan's historic speech at the Berlin Wall, almost twenty-two years ago to the day, on June 12, 1987, when he exclaimed: "There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace ... Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

This is the kind of language Obama needed to use in his speech. He needed to demand that the autocrats and occupiers of the region end their oppression; open the doors of their prisons and tear down their walls; and allow the peoples of the region to live in peace, freedom, and democracy. And he needed to put the muscle and money of U.S. foreign policy behind those words, the same way Reagan did in confronting the Soviet Union.

First and foremost, President Obama should have announced that the United States would stop providing political, economic, and military support to corrupt and brutal authoritarian regimes, without exception. This goes for occupiers such as Israel (and, one could add, India in Kashmir, and Morocco in the Western Sahara) and governments of key allies such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt, where thousands of activists have been harassed, imprisoned, tortured, and even killed by security forces without any fear of U.S. retribution. These activists will continue to suffer once Mr. Obama leaves.

Indeed, President Obama's speech gave no indication of just how grave the situation is in most Middle Eastern countries. Not only is poverty increasing in most, so is the level of repression. Most of our most important allies-in particular, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia-have seen political repression and censorship increase in the last few years, even as they've gradually liberalized socially to various degrees. Thousands of political prisoners languish in jails and face routine torture, all because they dare to take America's ideals more seriously than do our own leaders, including, it seems, President Obama.

How else to explain how he offered not one word of support for some of Egypt's most important dissident voices, such as Ayman Nour, the one-time presidential candidate recently released from prison, who not long before the speech was set on fire by government thugs? Instead, the Obama administration regularly praises Mubarak's "leadership" on a peace process that has done nothing to produce peace, while democracy activists young and old, secular and religious, face continual harassment or worse.

Instead of making concrete demands on President Mubarak and other regional leaders regarding freedom, democracy, human rights, and committing the United States to a major shift in our policies on those issues, President Obama argued that the first step to healing the U.S.-Islamic divide must be to "confront violent extremism in all of its forms." What the president doesn't realize is that from the standpoint of the peoples of the Middle East, U.S. support for the governments of Israel, Egypt, and other authoritarian regimes-along with our invasion of Iraq, which despite his pledge to "speak the truth" he refused to admit was wrong-has resulted in as much violence as attacks sanctioned by militant Islam. It is also considered equally extremist in its goals and the methods it uses to achieve them.

When it comes to Israel and Palestine, the president's words do mark a significant shift in tone from the rhetoric of his predecessors, especially his placing Palestine on equal footing with Israel as a nation deserving independence and sovereignty. But hearing them I couldn't help thinking that they constituted the speech that President Clinton should have given at the start of the Oslo peace process, when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat grudgingly shook hands on the White House lawn sixteen years ago.

Back then, when there were only a bit more than 100,000 Jewish settlers in the West Bank, calling for a "stop" to settlements made sense. Today, with nearly triple the number of settlers there, and with Israelis having rendered huge swaths of the West Bank permanently off-limits to Palestinians, it is a decade too late. Stopping settlement construction will still leave the West Bank a mishmash of Palestinian islands that cannot form the nucleus of a sovereign state.

By most any measure, nothing less than the dismantlement of the Israeli matrix of control over the West Bank, including most settlements, bypass roads, and checkpoints, will allow for the creation of a territorially viable Palestinian state.

Perhaps President Obama has determined that such a development, however desirable, is impossible to achieve at this point. After all, well-known scholars like Meron Benvenisti came to such a conclusion as far back as 1987. If so, Mr. Obama must move quickly to consider various alternative scenarios that would allow Israelis and Palestinians to achieve peace, security, stability, and sovereignty outside of the Oslo framework. Tikkun magazine has argued, for example, that most of the settlements could remain on the condition that the settlers accept Palestinian sovereignty and citizenship. Other proposals, like the condominialist concept outlined by David Nieli in the current issue, attempt to constrain citizenship to Jews or Palestinians only within each respective "state" within a larger bi-national condominium.

One could offer many criticisms of such proposals, from impracticality to injustice, but at least they are based on a realization of how untenable the current peace process and the possible outcomes it could lead to remain.

What is clear, however, is that most Muslim listeners to Obama's speech understand that unless the president is willing to force Israel to choose between the settlements and continued U.S. patronage, or take an even bigger chance by offering a creative solution that radically changes the way sovereignty and citizenship are understood by both peoples, peace will remain impossible to achieve.

Ultimately, Obama doesn't understand that the best and perhaps only way to get the peoples of the Muslim world to support policies such as preventing Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, pacifying Afghanistan, or stamping out violent Islamism, is to hold all the peoples of the region and their leaders, without exception, to one, easily measurable standard. Unless President Obama's words are matched by a rapid and profound shift in the strategic calculus underlying American foreign policy, Obama's historic speech will be remembered as little more than haki fadi, or empty talk, and peace in the Middle East-and with it America's quest for a better relationship with the people of the Muslim world-will remain an illusive dream.

Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle Eastern history at UC Irvine and author, most recently of Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009), and Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Random House/Three Rivers Press).