Israel Matzav

Every word in Cairo speech was deliberate

The weekend edition of the Los Angeles Times includes a lengthy report on the preparations for President Obama's speech in Cairo in June. The report talks about the deliberateness with which each word of the speech was prepared and the involvement of the President himself in the preparation. It's worth reading the whole thing (Hat Tip: Memeorandum), but I want to focus on what it says about Israel.

In the Arab-Israeli passage, they crossed boundaries of political correctness: Jews had been persecuted for centuries, they wrote, and their aspiration for a homeland is "rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied." At the same time, the Palestinian people "have suffered in pursuit of a homeland."

The earlier version hadn't referred to the Holocaust, nor to the denial of it by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now the team let fly: "Denying that fact is baseless. It is ignorant, and it is hateful.

"Threatening Israel with destruction, or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews, is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of the Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve."

From an Israeli's perspective, it would have been better if they had separated the passage about the State of Israel, threats to destroy it and Jewish suffering from the references to Holocaust denial. Two of the things Israelis found most offensive about the speech were Obama's assertion that it was the Holocaust that provided the justification for the creation of a Jewish state in Israel and his equating of 'Palestinian suffering' with Jewish suffering - particularly in the Holocaust.

I wonder if Obama himself was as involved in the 2008 AIPAC speech in which he said that Jerusalem should be a united city under Israeli control and then retracted the next day.

Read the whole thing.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:03 AM