I received a response to my self-admittedly scattered Blog post last night, from a very good friend – whose opinions I both respect and try to understand, but on many points overwhelmingly disagree with. I hope to voice my response to what I see as her main points, found in bold below. Currently, the full comment can be found linked to my previous post:
“I hate to break it to you, but Obama is nothing but a fake. The charisma and shining intellect you so admire in Obama is nothing but an act he puts on to make people like him.”
Talk about getting my blood boiling quickly. I am typically not one to use the word hate – and mean it – but I hate this argument, and as I mentioned yesterday, I feel like it’s everywhere. Those espoused to the ideology of the Israeli right are scared absolutely shitless of a President Obama who, as JewSchool’s Kung Fu Jew put it: “[treats] Israel not as a pampered toddler but as the adult country it is.” As far as American Foreign Policy goes, I feel much more comfortable with a US-Israel relationship not based on blind, unrelenting support, but dialogue, and at times, disagreements. The Bush years of Middle-East Foreign Policy centered around the Arab world as the enemy, making Israel the United States’ de-facto ally. I am, and always have been a proponant of a strong Israeli-US relationship, not because of our supposed shared enemies, but because of our shared goals of Democratic values and yearning for peace. To move back to the initial comment: I view our President as far from a fake, but rather a man who is not afraid to make the appropriate, difficult moves in reaching out to the Arab world which previous Presidents have been unable to do. I am cautious of what he says and does with Iran and other known terrorist organizations, sure, but this forces me to label him not a fake, but a realist. I truly believe his charisma and intellect to be true, and I resent those who say otherwise.
“Now that he is president he has turned his back on many of the communities that supported his campaign.”
To make such a statement is both premature, and hostile. Obama has inherited one of the worst recessions this country has ever seen, with unemployment at all time highs, thousands of Americans losing their homes every day, struggling to put food on the table. Any American President is going to be faced with a diverse array of issues each morning he shows up for work. Certainly, he cannot tackle each individual issue the moment it is brought to his desk – we must wait to see these results. A President, though elected for what he proposes to do in his four years, must not be judged on his ability to check issues off of his platform. Rather, we must judge him by what he accomplishes by January of 2013. I am confident that President Obama has not forgotten about the issues or groups which elected him – just give him time.
“The Jewish community has been left out in the cold as well.”
No. It has not. The Jewish community – via people who share this argument – are portraying themselves as left out in the cold because they are not seeing a President make the decisions they want him to make – which is difficult, of course. We must remember that in a Democracy there will always be two sides of an issue, and people on both of those sides feeling pasionately. In George W. Bush, the pro-Israel community had a President whom we did not need to worry about (on this issue, anyway, everything else was a different story) – we knew how he was going to react, and we knew that he was not going to criticize Israel, so we moved on and complained about other things. Now we encounter a President who is interested and motivated in making significant steps towards a two-state solution – which is what we will, I promise you, end up with further down the road. The steps to getting there will be incredibly difficult, and will involve sacrifices from both the Israelis and the Palestinians. A pragmatic opproach to solving the Middle-East crisis suggests that we cannot solve such a complicated problem by hoping it will go away, or ignoring it. We – the Jewish community – must man up, as it were, and face these problems head on.
“Now, he is sympathizing with Palestinian terrorists set on destroying Israel. There is a difference between forging connections between enemies and sympathizing with a terrorist government and forcing an ally into a situation that is unsafe for its people. Obama is the end for Israel.”
We must remember that amongst the Palestinians, there is neither one clear leader, nor a leader at all without some ties that the pro-Israel community will find objectionable. I would never suggest or support complete reliance on negotiating with those people deemed or associated with terrorists, but it is vital to remember that these are the cards dealt to us at the moment – if you will allow the analogy. Though it is much to our chagrin, it is much more important at this hour to talk with anyone and everyone we can about peace, rather than selectively not talking to them because we disapprove of their ideals or actions – even if those actions are detrimental to us.
In the end, I know that Israel’s leaders will never allow themselves to be put into a situation they deem unsafe for the Israeli populace, but they must understand that living stubbornly under the status quo – in which both sides wait for the other to make the first, hardest move, all the while pointing fingers – will never work. I am upset that many consider Obama “the end for Israel.” I view this, obviously, to be far from the truth. Bear in mind the advisors President Obama keeps closest to his office – namely his Chief of Staff, Rahm Israel Emanuel (his real middle name, not satire) – another former Senator from Illinois. If anyone has Israel’s best interest at heart, it is he. After all, have any of us made as significant sacrifices for her safety as he has?
“The PA is unwilling to recognize the state of Israel and will not stop anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda in its territories…Obama cannot expect Israel to forget their conditions for peace if the PA won’t do the same.“
If not, then that is their prerogative, and peace talks will not go forward. This is one of the conditions which Obama has set forth for the Palestinians to confront as a peace process is pursued. If they openly choose not to recognize Israel after encountering an American President who is such a willing partner, such a move will resonate loudly across the world. Though Obama is currently, with this mornings speech in Cairo, addressing the Muslim community as a whole, in that speech he restated expectations of both parties. We must assume that this means he intends to hold both Israel and the Palestinians to these expectations.
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Solving the Middle-East conflict, at this point and from now on, needs to be a process of making decisions few of us want to make. If we do not make them, we will only continue this ugly path, to revisit the same questions and issues further down the line. I believe we have an American President in Barack Obama committed to finding a middle ground which neither side will be completely thrilled about – suggesting that we have truly found a middle ground.
Time will tell.
