A small step for Obama, a giant leap backwards for US-Israel relations
 
ANALYSIS: AHRON SHAPIRO 
US President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech will be well received by the vast majority of the world and rightly so. It deserves lavish praise on many levels, not the least of which being its unprecedented nature.¬†In its own way, it represented something of a moonshot heralding what Obama called a “new beginning” in US relations with the Moslem world.
Most of the hour-long speech pertained to issues beyond the scope of this analysis, which must be confined to the very brief parts of the speech that affected Jews in general and the Jewish State in particular.¬†From a purely Jewish concern, there is not much to talk about. One could say there was a missed opportunity on the President’s part to confront anti-Jewish vitriol rampant in much of the Muslim world.¬†
In an exhaustive speech where seemingly nothing was left out but the kitchen sink, those particular lines that deserved to be in that speech were omitted. Very little mention was made of Judaism otherwise, except to serve the cause of interfaith bonding. The remainder of this analysis is devoted to how this speech dealt with Israel, and how it may impact it. Here there was some good news and bad news. Lets start with the good news. 
The good news is that Obama has made crystal clear expectations of Muslims everywhere to accept Israel once and for all. Never before has a US president laid the cards on the table to the Arab world with such conviction. It would also appear that Obama expects that acceptance to be acknowledged by Arab nations very soon, without negotiation and without a quid pro quo. This is simply huge.
Furthermore, Obama flatly rejects a future where Israeli citizens will be subject to violence from either inside or outside its borders. That is a red line for him, and entirely unacceptable. This is something that he wants every single Muslim to know, and this is not insignificant.¬†That’s about it for the good news.
The bad news, unfortunately, is quite substantial. Probably the worst disservice the President did to Israel in his speech was to perpetuate the dangerous myths that the justification for the creation of Israel was based upon the suffering the Jews incurred during the Holocaust and other historical persecutions, and that Israel was born out of the suffering of Palestinians. 
At no time did Obama acknowledge the Jewish people’s connection to the Land of Israel. He most certainly acknowledged the Palestinian connection to that land, by his implication that Israel’s creation had been the cause of their displacement and suffering. You might think this is a minor point, but it is not.¬†Without a legitimate connection to the land, Israel’s borders are ephemeral and unimportant, and Israel’s right to exist is constructed upon a morally inferior foundation.
Since every word of his speech was pored over by Obama and his advisors for weeks, one has to ask why this inaccurate and revisionist version of Zionism Рa version lifted verbatim from the Palestinian viewpoint Рwas the one Obama chose to present to the Arab world in his one opportunity to address it. It would appear that the honest talk that Obama said that friends had to be prepared to hear from each other applies more to the US relationship with Israel, and less with the Palestinians.
And, yes, Obama asks the Muslims to accept Israel, but in a backhanded way, by saying that behind closed doors honest Muslims admit to themselves that Israel “is not going away.”¬†This would suggest the empty recognition of the sort that former Palestinian Authority president Yassir Arafat sold to the PLO in order to sign the Oslo Accords, something that falls short of a deeper acceptance of legitimacy.
Much will be made in the media of Obama’s thunderous call on Israel to stop settlements. This obsession Obama has with a total settlement freeze is shaping up to be the only true vertebrae of backbone in Obama’s current foreign policy.¬†North Korea and Iran can walk all over the US and get off with a slap on the wrist, but Obama seems prepared to start twisting arms at the Knesset over the settlements, literally if necessary.¬†
While Obama claims natural growth construction violates agreements, the reality is the type of freeze Obama is suggesting represents a substantial rollback of American policy and goes beyond what even Arafat himself was willing to accept in the Oslo Accords as well as what he had okayed during the Camp David peace talks in 2000.¬†While it has not been noted by many analysts, this “more Catholic than the Pope” demand of Obama’s, launched no less in the absence of any current peace negotiations, would appear to hint that the Palestinian state that Obama envisions is intended to be built along the pre-’67 borders to the millimetre.¬†
That notion will be difficult for most Israelis, both on the Right and a good chunk of the Left, to swallow, and will make Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s job much harder.¬†But that is not the only concession that Obama demanded from Israel in the Cairo speech. Far from it.
In just a short section of his speech, Obama detailed a veritable laundry list of expectations that he has for Israel concerning the Palestinians, every single one of them a future pressure point to be exerted on Jerusalem.¬†To be fair, he asked for things in return from the Palestinians also. Specifically three things: Stop the violence, tone down the rhetoric, and recognise Israel. That’s it.
These are vague concepts, difficult to quantify that even Palestinian extremist groups have toyed with at times in the past as mere tactics. The lulls in violence between Israel and the Palestinians since Oslo have never been mistaken for signs of genuine steps by the Palestinians towards peace, but taking Obama’s speech on face value, he would interpret the next lull as just that.Despite the lopsidedness of the rough-sketch peace process that Obama envisioned in his speech, Netanyahu can find solace in one thing: Obama has yet to show the mettle to back up his words with actions.¬†
That might work into Israel’s favour as it scrambles to hold its ground in the face of US pressure, but no where is that potential weakness of Obama’s going to be more problematic than in the US dealings with Iran.
Obama’s brief discussion about Iran surely had Israeli military strategists reaching for their antacids, or whisky bottle, or perhaps both. This is because, while much of Obama’s speech had a dreamy, utopian tone to it, it was his assessment of Iran that was most detached from reality.¬†Obama’s argument for keeping nuclear weapons out of Iran’s hands – to avoid a Mid-East nuclear arms race – was woefully unconvincing, and the rest of his conclusions were far-fetched.¬†
His blessing for a nuclear energy plan for this oil rich state was dangerously naive, as if being a signatory of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is any guarantee that those nuclear facilities will not be misused. Has Obama already forgotten NPT-signatory North Korea’s latest nuclear test?¬†Also naive was his reasoning that he has a right to ask Iran to give up its quest for nuclear arms so long as he simultaneously works to eliminate nuclear weapons globally, starting at home. Obviously, Obama does not subscribe to the reasoning that when nuclear arms are outlawed, only outlaws will have nuclear arms.¬†
In conclusion, Obama’s Cairo speech to the Muslim world was an eloquent, heartfelt and moving example of the “outstretched hand” approach that embodies his foreign policy.¬†However, it also exposes an achilles heel that is almost certainly to be exploited during his presidency, if not by Iran than by some other regime.¬†
That weakness is that Obama desperately wants to be seen as an ally to the Muslim world. This undisguised desire will almost certainly invite acts of provocation by upstart Muslim warlords who are willing to gamble that the US president will think twice before ordering military action against new Muslim targets.¬†Back in the West Bank, it may also encourage blackmail by Palestinian leaders who will threaten to damage Obama’s standing in the Arab world if he does not act as their proxy regarding their demands upon Israel.
Obama, who has relied upon the power of his speeches to take him this far, will now be put to the test of just how far any speech can go to actually effect change. History will judge whether the Cairo speech was the moonshot that Obama had hoped for, or if it was just an hour of musings of wishful thinking from a space cadet.
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