CAIRO: More than three decades ago Jacques Ellul, the French moral philosopher and sociologist argued that the development and impact of mass media revolutionizes politics in a negative sense, because of the flood of indiscriminate information and discontinuous facts overwhelming any sense of historic context.
Nowhere is that more demonstrative these days than in our perceptions and concerns about President Obama — about his understanding and his intentions — towards the Muslim world in general and the Israeli-Palestinian impasse in particular.
And nowhere is that more immediately demonstrative than the puzzle of how could Obama suddenly hint in his inaugural speech and his first Presidential TV interview (with an Arab satellite news channel) and then dramatically confirm all of that when he spoke last June in Cairo after seemingly catering to APAIC during the elections (including the disowning of any major advisory roles for Carter’s national security advisor Zhibniew Brzezinski).
But in what seemed like retreat from Cairo followed month after month. Having already sacrificed Ambo. Chaas Freeman, the most outspoken critic of Israeli policies within the milieu of official Washington when the Israel Lobby reacted in fury to his appointment to Obama’s National Security team, there is non-stop talk about America’s unshakeable bonds with Israel and the equally politically iconic commitment to Israel’s security not to mention discounting the Goldstone Report, and retreating from his own initial call for an unqualified settlement freeze following Netanyahu predictable equivocations.
Then suddenly again, seemingly out of nowhere, for Obama’s spokesmen — in particular Secretary of State Clinton (who also spoke the unspeakable at this year’s AIPAC) — to take such high offense in the Bidon-in- Jerusalem- humiliation culminating in the most calculated Netanyahu-in- Washington-Counter -Humiliation in which Obama played the major role.
These concerns have inspired a major conference in Washington DC this coming Wednesday — “U.S. Relations with the Muslim World: One year After Cairo” —organized by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy and which will feature the White House and State Department as well as the usual DC think tank and scholarly suspects.
But in contrast to the discontinuity/indiscriminate reporting media syndrome, were the important and deeply investigative pre-election profiles of Obama in The New Yorker magazine and in The New York Times. They suggested as historic context that on the one hand Obama, in contrast perhaps to any other President (the best of whom on this issue were late learners) has a fundamental sense of the Palestine case. That sensitivity goes back to his earliest years in Chicago.
On the other hand those two articles also insisted that Obama was a profoundly pragmatic politician which has contributed as much to his success and survival given his take on the Palestine problem, as well as his brilliance in formulating and delivering prepared speeches — in particular the Cairo speech of 2009 which signalled what was already underway — a dramatic change of course from the Bush administration’s take on American, Arab and Israeli relations.
Changes prefigured but barely reported in two policy papers quietly circulating in Washington — “Changing Course” issued by the US- Muslim Engagement Initiative sponsored by Common Ground just prior to the elections; and the even more pointed paper on the borders issue as the imminent issue in a policy paper from the James A.Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University. Together they deserve a column on their own if we are to grasp Obama’s perspective.
But equally significant is that nobody recalled the relevance of that deep streak of Obama pragmatism of late as much as the NYTimes/IHT columnist Roger Cohen who back in March recognized that the passage of the US health care bill, what conventional thinking saw only as a grave domestic issue for Obama, was in fact “a major foreign policy victory.” It empowered Obama , Cohen observed, “demonstrating his ability to deliver. Nowhere is that more important than in the Middle East. The reminder was timely: This man is no softie.”
That same pragmatism underlies the most significant public acknowledgement by Obama at a news conference last week of what has already been described, as “ a far-reaching shift in how the US views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
Obama acknowledged that shift — not in the more abstract language for most Americans, of Palestinian suffering, or UN resolutions, but rather as ”a vital national security interest of the United States.” This was an allusion, well understood finally by US media, to the incredibly important remarks made last month by top US military commander General David Patraeus who said that “lack of progress in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict creates a hostile environment for the United States,” and he suggested (although Petraeus now says he didn’t put it quite that way) that growing hostility because of this lack of progress endangers the lives of American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan
So begins increasing if not yet confirmed references in the American press, to an American final issues peace plan that will be put into play — a polite phrase for a plan that will be, however discreetly, be imposed. Perhaps it is now time (if it is to be pragmatically imposed) for a new speech by Obama — a Tel Aviv Speech.
S. Abdallah Schleifer is Distinguished Professor of Journalism at the American University in Cairo and Adjunct scholar at the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C.
