Israel Matzav

Will Obama deliver an historically Kosher speech?

The Washington Post reports that at a meeting last week, American Jewish leaders advised President Obama that if he really wants to press a re-set button with Israelis, he's going to have to acknowledge Israel's historical claim to the land of Israel. Leo Rennert wonders whether the President is capable of doing that.

So it would seem that Obama finally could be on the right historical track if, during his Jerusalem visit later this month, he substituted the Bible for the Holocaust as the real genesis of Zionism.

Well, not quite.  Pointing to the Bible as the fundamental undergirding of Jewish nationhood would be a big step forward for Obama.  But as history, it would still fall short -- at best a single or a double, to use baseball jargon.  If Obama were aiming to score a homer, he would have to add evidence more attuned to secular minds in the 21^st century.  And there's plenty of that as well -- especially in Jerusalem where archeology and the Bible validate each other.

Or Obama could point as far as Rome and the Arch of Titus with its frieze of Roman legionnaires returning triumphantly from their destruction of the Jewish Temple, carrying the Temple's golden seven-branch menorah.  That happened 2,000 years before the Holocaust.

Why is all this crucial as addenda to the Bible to support Jewish sovereignty?  For one thing, from Mahmoud Abbas on down, Palestinians keep denying any historic Jewish ties to Jerusalem, clinging instead to the anti-Jewish Ahmadinejad formula that Israel is a recent colonial implant.  For another thing, physical archeological evidence is as crucial as -- if not more so than -- biblical accounts in an increasingly secular world.  If non-believers shrug off biblical evidence, they cannot avert their eyes from a profusion of graphic empirical evidence.

When Obama delivers his major address in Jerusalem, it will be interesting to hear whether he realizes the huge errors of his 2009 Cairo speech and how far he is willing to go to give the world a full account of Israel's sovereignty claims -- backed up not only by the Bible, but also by irrefutable empirical evidence.

In other words, will Obama finally deliver a historically kosher speech?

I wouldn't bet on it. I think he'll just skip the Holocaust reference and try to fudge it. 

Labels: Barack Hussein Obama, bible, Holocaust, Israel is a Jewish state, Israel's right to exist

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:12 PM