Obama in Palestine: In Their Shoes
Obama's feet were in Palestine. His head was in Israel.
It started from the first moment. The President of the United States came to Ramallah. He visited the Mukata’a, the “compound” which serves as the office of the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
One cannot enter the Mukata’a without noticing the grave of Yasser Arafat, just a few paces from the entrance.
It is quite impossible to ignore this landmark while passing it. However, Obama succeeded in doing just that.
It was like spitting in the face of the entire Palestinian people. Imagine a foreign dignitary coming to France and not laying a wreath at the tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Or coming to Israel and not visiting Yad Vashem. It is more than insulting. It is stupid.
Yasser Arafat is for the Palestinians what Gorge Washington is for Americans, Mahatma Gandhi for Indians, David Ben-Gurion for Israelis. The Father of the Nation. Even his domestic opponents on the left and on the right revere his memory. He is the supreme symbol of the modern Palestinian national movement. His picture hangs in every Palestinian office and school.
So why not honor him? Why not lay a wreath on his grave, as foreign leaders have done before?
Because Arafat has been demonized and vilified in Israel like no other human being since Hitler. And still is.
Obama was simply afraid of the Israeli reaction. After his huge success in Israel, he feared that such a gesture would undo the effect of his address to the Israeli people.
This consideration guided Obama throughout his short visit to the West Bank. His feet were in Palestine, his head was in Israel.
He walked in Palestine. He talked to Palestine. But his thoughts were about the Israelis.
Even when he said good things, his tone was wrong. He just could not hit the right note. Somehow he missed the cue.
Why? Because of a complete lack of empathy.
Empathy is something hard to define. I am spoiled in this respect, because I had the good fortune to live for many years near a person who had it in abundance. Rachel, my wife, hit the right tone with everyone, high or low, local or foreign, the old and the very young.
Obama did so in Israel. It was really amazing. He must have studied us thoroughly. He knew our strengths and our weaknesses, our paranoias and our idiosyncrasies, our historical memories and dreams about the future.
And no wonder. He is surrounded by Zionist Jews. They are his closest advisors, his friends and his experts on the Middle East. Even from mere contact with them, he obviously absorbed much of our sensitivities.
As far as I know, there is not a single Arab, not to mention Palestinian, in the White House and its surroundings.
I assume that he does receive occasional briefings about Arab affairs from the State Department. But such dry memoranda are not the stuff empathy is made of. The more so as clever diplomats must have learned by now not to write anything that may offend Israelis.
So how could the poor man have possibly picked up empathy towards the Palestinians?
The conflict between Israel and Palestine has very solid factual causes. But it has also been rightly described as a “clash between traumas”: the Holocaust trauma of the Jews and the Naqba trauma of the Palestinians (without suggesting equivalence between the two calamities.)
Many years ago in New York I met a very good friend of mine. He was an Arab citizen of Israel, a young poet who had left Israel and joined the PLO. He invited me to meet some Palestinians at his home in a suburb of New York. His family name, by the way, was the same as Obama’s middle name.
When I entered the apartment, it was crammed full with Palestinians – Palestinians of all stripes, from Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, the refugee camps and the Diaspora. We had a very emotional debate, full of heated arguments and counter-arguments. When we left I asked Rachel what, to her mind, was the most outstanding common sentiment of all these people. “The sense of injustice!” she replied without hesitation.
That was exactly what I felt. “If Israel could just apologize for what we have done to the Palestinian people, a huge obstacle would have been removed from the road to peace,” I answered her.
It would have been a good beginning for Obama in Ramallah if he had addressed this point. It was not the Palestinians who killed six million Jews. It was the European countries and – yes – the USA which callously closed their doors to the Jews, who were desperately trying to escape the lot awaiting them. And it was the Muslim world which welcomed hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing from Catholic Spain and the inquisition some 500 years ago.
Our conflict is tragic, more than most. One of its tragedies is that neither side can be entirely blamed. There is not one narrative, but two. Each side is convinced of the absolute justice of its cause. Each side nurses its overwhelming sense of victimhood. Though there can be no symmetry between settlers and natives, occupier and occupied, in this respect they are the same.
The trouble with Obama is that he has completely, entirely, totally embraced one narrative, while being almost completely oblivious to the other. Every word he uttered in Israel gave testimony to his deeply-rooted Zionist convictions. Not just the words he said, but the tone, the body language, all bore the marks of honesty. Evidently, he had internalized the Zionist version of every single detail of the conflict.
Nothing like this was in evidence in Ramallah. Some dry formulas, yes. Some honest efforts to break the ice, indeed. But nothing that touched the hearts of the Palestinians.
He told his Israeli audience to “put yourselves in the shoes of the Palestinians”. But did he do so himself? Can he imagine what it means to wait every night for the brutal banging on the door? To be woken by the noise of bulldozers approaching, wondering whether they are coming to destroy your home? To see a settlement growing on your land and waiting for the settlers to come and carry out a pogrom in your village? Being unable to move on your roads? To see your father humiliated at the road blocks? To throw stones at armed soldiers and brave tear gas, rubber-coated steel bullets and sometimes live ammunition?
Can he even imagine having a brother, a cousin, a loved one in prison for many, many years because of his patriotic actions or beliefs, after facing the arbitrariness of a military “court”, or even without a “trial” at all?
This week, a prisoner called Maisara Abu-Hamdiyeh died in prison, and the West Bank exploded in rage. Israeli journalists ridiculed the protest, stating that the man died from a fatal disease, so Israel could not be blamed.
Did any of them imagine for a moment what it means for a human being to suffer from cancer, with the disease slowly spreading through his body, deprived of adequate treatment, cut off from family and friends, seeing death approaching? What if it had been their father?
The occupation is not an abstract matter. It is a daily reality for two and a half million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem – not to mention the restrictions on Gaza.
It does not concern only the individuals practically denied all human rights. It primarily concerns the Palestinians as a nation.
We Israelis, perhaps more than anyone else, should know that belonging to one’s nation, in one’s own state, under one’s own flag, is a basic right of every human being. In the present epoch, it is an essential element of human dignity. No people will settle for less.
The Israeli government insists that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as the “Nation-State of the Jewish People”. It adamantly refuses to recognize Palestine as the “Nation-State of the Palestinian People”. What is Obama’s position on that?
Following the visit, Secretary of State John Kerry is now working hard to “prepare the ground” for a “resumption” of the “peace talks” between Israel and the PLO. Many quotation marks for something so flimsy.
Diplomats can string together hollow phrases to conjure up the illusion of progress. That is one of their main talents. But after a historic conflict lasting some 130 years, no progress towards peace between the two peoples can be real, if there is no equal respect for their national history, rights, feelings and aspirations.
As long as the US leadership cannot bring itself to that point, the chance of its contributing to peace in this tormented country is close to nil.
Read more by Uri Avnery
- After Bibi’s Apology, Reflect on the Idiocy of Attacking the Gaza Flotilla – March 29th, 2013
- The Riddle of the Israel Lobby – February 24th, 2013
- Welcome, Chuck – January 11th, 2013
- The Sea and the River – December 16th, 2012
- Cold Revenge – December 9th, 2012
Debbie(aussie)
April 7th, 2013 at 10:09 pm
Nicely said, thank you.
Zephyr Global Report, 4/8/2013 | Zephyr Global Report
April 7th, 2013 at 10:37 pm
[...] Obama in Palestine: In Their Shoes by Uri Avnery [...]
Theo baumann
April 7th, 2013 at 11:45 pm
If only Israel had more Uri Avnery, life over there would be so much better for everyone.
david singer
April 7th, 2013 at 11:49 pm
The Palestinian Arab narrative ignores Obama’s sweep of history – starting its narrative from 1948 by characterising the conflict as the “Israeli – Palestinian conflict” – thus allowing such narrative to completely ignore a host of critical events that occurred between 1917-1947.
The Palestinian Arab narrative conveniently ignores the fact that the two-state solution was first suggested in 1922 and actually proposed and rejected by the Palestinian Arabs in 1937, 1938 and 1947.
The Palestinian Arab narrative has no memory or remorse for the Arab riots in 1920 and 1929 that targeted and slaughtered Jews or the 1936-1939 Arab revolt which wrought similar havoc on Jews living in Palestine during those turbulent years.
Starting from 1948 the Arab narrative can avoid confronting the reality that Winston Churchill told a delegation of Palestinian Arabs leaders in 1921 urging him to halt Jewish immigration to Palestine:
“It is manifestly right that the Jews,who are scattered all over the world,should have a national centre and a National Home,where some of them may be reunited. and where else could that be but in the land of Palestine, with which for more than three thousand years they have been intimately and profoundly associated?”
The flawed Arab narrative also avoids accepting responsibility for the Arab pressure put on Great Britain to severely curtail Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1939 and 1945 – resulting in hundreds of thousands of Jews perishing at the hands of the Nazis when their lives might have been spared had Great Britain ignored such inhumane Arab demands.
The Arab narrative has always rejected – and will continue to reject – the will of the international community expressed in the 1920 San Remo Conference and the Treaty of Sevres, the 1922 Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the 1945 United Nations Charter.
President Obama has indeed empathised with the Jewish narrative – which dates the “Jewish – Arab conflict” as having begun in 1880 – not 1948.
Until both narratives at the very least commence from an agreed starting date – one can confidently predict that any talk of peacefully resolving the ongoing and unresolved conflict is a complete waste of time.
Hopefully President Obama has taken the first step to ram this message home.
sherban
April 8th, 2013 at 2:55 am
Obama didn't honor Arafata because sooner will be known that the last was poisoned and , of course, nothing will follow as a nobody was killed.So Obama couldn't honor Arafat now and after two months ,when the results of the analyses will be published, to shoot up and not relate to the "case".However,the tragedy seen by Avnery in which no side could be blamed is an absurd play where Palestinians suffers like dogs because the Jews suffered from the Germans .
AUGUSTBRHM
April 8th, 2013 at 3:04 am
The zionist will apply the same measure as the yanks did to the native americans only worse.
david singer
April 8th, 2013 at 3:25 am
Has my comment got lost in cyberspace?
richard vajs
April 8th, 2013 at 4:47 am
One thing that I disagree with – there is NOT two sides to Israeli-Palestinian conflict – the Israeli argument is all false.
I know its tough
April 8th, 2013 at 5:25 am
The equivalence does not exist. The fact is out right slaughter is better than oppression. The problem with being able to annihilate The Palestinians is that it would lead to World War Three which would end The State of Israel. Therefore left with this as the result oppression continues only matched by slavery American style. The Israelis need to abandon the position of a Jewish State for Jews and instead have an Israeli State for Israelis. Providing for all its citizens the same law protections and benefits equally. There need not be fear that in democratic elections that Israeli Arabs who could become the largest number would retaliate against them when they ascend to control of the State. History has proving that has not being the case, just as with Emancipation my Ancestors did not go on get even campaigns, even with Slave Revolts the target was the cruelty of the system not the innocent. Have faith in The Inherent Dignity and Value of Human Essence, it is The Excellence of Our Creation.
Bob D
April 8th, 2013 at 8:07 am
And the Zionist narrative is so sensitive to the existing apartide occupation which cannot be rewritten like your edited one-sided history lesson. After all, two wrongs make a right. And while we're at it, is there any debate that comparing the conquering "christians" of the middle ages with the conquering "moslems", while we can't call either merciful, at least the moslems were a whole lot more rational.
JoaoAlfaiate
April 8th, 2013 at 10:28 am
"…no memory or remorse for the Arab riots in 1920 and 1929…" If I were confronted with a bunch of unwanted and uninvited foreigners intent on taking over my country and marginalizing me, the very least I would do is riot. Why is it that the zionists cast themselves as the eternal victims and everybody in the USA accepts it ?
wafic
April 8th, 2013 at 4:28 pm
There will never be a two state solution and any efforts to that end are wasted. This is the way it has to be. When the western economy collapses ushering in a new era for the BRICs, the end of the petro dollar, and new world leaders, and the rise of the caliphate by 2024 it will be the end of Israel as we know it today. In the end it won't have lasted 100 years.
david singer
April 8th, 2013 at 4:52 pm
Five Jews and four Arabs died in the 1920 riots. 216 Jews were injured, 18 critically, and 23 Arabs, one critically. About 300 Jews were evacuated from the Old City.
In the 1929 riot in Hebron – In total, 67 Jews and 9 Arabs were killed. Of the Jews killed, 59 died during the rioting and 8 more later succumbed to their wounds. They included a dozen women and three children under the age of three.
More than 300 Jews died during the Arab revolt between 1936-1939.
One further comment – Palestine did not belong to the Palestinian Arabs. It belonged to the Ottoman Empire and formed 0.01% of the territory liberated by the Allied Powers in World War 1 in which those Powers decided that the Jewish National Home was to be reconstituted. The other 99.99% was set aside by those same Powers for Arab self-determination.
The inability of the Arabs to accept this division of the spoils of war has caused them – and the rest of the world – indigestion ever since.
PALESTINE NEWS | April 7, 2013 | #OpIsrael | Occupied Palestine | فلسطين
April 8th, 2013 at 9:46 pm
[...] Obama in Palestine: In Their Shoes http://original.antiwar.com/avnery/2013/04/07/obama-in-palestine-in-their-shoes-2/ [...]