According to Reports: Obama Distorts in the Name of Diplomacy
Posted on: June 18, 2009

In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,” Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, looks at how Obama finessed Israel’s founding for a Muslim audience, and rebuts a column on “Seven Jewish Children.”

New York Times columnist David Brooks is as shrewd and erudite an observer of world affairs as one can hope to find in journalism today. In his June 5 column (“The Chicago View” ) about U.S. President Barack Obama’s Cairo speech, Brooks argued that Obama is a pragmatist, not a rigid ideologue, who tries to combine diplomatic idealism with hard-core political realism.

According to Brooks, in the pursuit of pragmatism in Cairo, Obama took competing Arab and Israeli historical narratives “and tried to create a new narrative that all sides could relate to.”

“To construct this new narrative,” Brooks continued, “Obama strung together some hard truths, historical distortions, eloquent appeals and strained [better put: illegitimate] moral equivalences.”

The problem is that even given Obama’s admirable willingness to speak “some hard truths,” his distortions nevertheless made his effort to “construct” a new, shared narrative dubious, even though Brooks didn’t see it this way. Brooks defended Obama, saying that the president, after all, is engaged in “diplomacy, not scholarship.”

Still, Brooks did cite some critics’ complaints about Obama’s distortions. For instance, the president compared the plight of the Palestinians to that of former slaves in the American south. This was arguably an unsuccessful attempt to make a point about pursuing only non-violent struggle. There was, unfortunately, no mention of efforts over many years to achieve peace through negotiations between Israel and its Arab neighbours including the Palestinians.

Nonetheless, never before in an Arab capital had Arab and Moslem audiences listened to a leader speak about the need for them to recognize Israel’s legitimacy. Again, critics have pointed out that a central part of that legitimacy is something Obama failed to note – that the Jews have an unbroken historical attachment to the land dating back millenia. However, by focusing solely on the Holocaust as the tragic episode in the Jews’ past, he left the impression that the Holocaust is the raison d’etre for the existence of the State of Israel, whereas in truth that horror was only a catalyst that accelerated Israel’s creation.

To his credit, Obama tried to inculcate the truth about the Holocaust in areas of the world where it is widely denied, and where anti-Jewish/anti-Zionist conspiracy theories, including about 9/11, run rampant.

Realistically, there was only so much “truth telling” that could happen on this one special occasion. And this was, as Brooks indicated, an important start.

* * *

While faulting my May 14 column for taking playwright Caryl Churchill’s words in “Seven Jewish Children” out of context, Yoni Goldstein (CJN, June 11) wrote that her play “is perhaps the most rational encounter with the frail psyche of an Israeli parent that I have ever seen.”

Really? Here’s the reaction of Yossi Klein Halevi, a highly respected Israeli writer who cares deeply about reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians:

“My only reaction is that the play is a lie: As the father of Israeli children, I know no Israeli parent who would speak that way to his/her children. Maybe there are some; maybe some Kachniks. But it is so beyond the pale of Israeli discourse between parents and children, so ludicrous, that that in itself is a form of blood libel. I know some Jews have written in her defense. But the play is so dishonest, so corrupt, that anyone who touches this risks being contaminated with the sin of demonizing the Jews.”

Goldstein also faults me for taking his own words (in a National Post column defending the play) out of context – for failing to note that he had written that for Churchill the link between the Holocaust perpetrated against the Jews “and another, newer, genocide of the Palestinians perpetrated by Israel” is “tenuous at best.”

“See the difference?” Goldstein asks. However, he fails to understand that this “difference” is actually irrelevant. One expects a playwright to insinuate explosive ideas, not to declare them baldly. But this “artfulness” in no way lessens their impact. If anything, it only makes noxious ideas more effective, even insidious. In this case, linking Jews/Israelis to Nazis remains a hideous, grotesque lie.