One man walked onto the stage in Cairo and delivered a sermon to an audience of billions. He unfolded before them the map of a new world, a different world. Barack Hussein Obama — as he took pains to call himself — is the most powerful man on earth. Every word he utters is a political fact.

“A historic speech,” pronounced commentators in a hundred languages. I prefer another adjective: The speech was right.

Every word was in its place, every sentence precise, every tone in harmony. The new moral integrity and the sense of honesty increased the impact of the revolutionary content.

And a revolutionary speech it certainly was.

In 55 minutes, it not only wiped away the eight years of George W. Bush, but also much of the preceding decades, from World War II on.

The president spoke to hundreds of million US citizens no less than to a billion Muslims. The American culture is based on the myth of the Wild West, with its Good Guys and Bad Guys, violent justice, dueling under the midday sun. Since the American nation is composed of immigrants from all over the world, its unity seems to require a threatening, world-encompassing evil enemy. After the collapse of the Soviet empire, this role was taken over by Islam.

This enemy captured the imagination of the masses and supplied material for television and cinema. Obama is now uprooting this myth. He wipes away the picture of one enemy, without painting another in its place. He preaches against the violent, adversary attitude itself, and starts to work to replace it with a culture of partnership between nations, civilizations and religions.

I see Obama as the first great messenger of the 21st century. That’s why this speech really was historic: Obama outlined the basic contours of a world constitution.

While Obama proclaims the 21st century, the government of Israel is returning to the 19th — the century that gave birth to modern anti-Semitism and to its response, modern Zionism.

Obama’s vision is not anti-national. He spoke with pride about the American nation. But his nationalism is of another sort: An inclusive, multicultural and nonsexist nationalism, which includes all the citizens of a country and respects other nations.

Compared to this, how miserable is the mental world of the Israeli right! How miserable is the violent, fanatical-religious world of the settlers, the chauvinist ghetto of Netanyahu, Lieberman and Barak, the racist-fascist closed-in world of their Kahanist allies!

One has to understand this moral and spiritual dimension of Obama’s speech before considering its political implications. Not only in the political sphere are Obama and Netanyahu on a collision course. The underlying collision is between two mental worlds which are as distinct from each other as the sun and the moon.

In Obama’s mental world, there is no place for the Israeli right or its equivalents elsewhere.

In the political sphere, too, a huge gap has opened up between the governments of Israel and the US.

During the last few years, successive Israeli governments have ridden the wave of Islamophobia that has spread throughout the West. After all, the Palestinians are Arabs, the Arabs are Muslims, the Muslims are terrorists — so that Israel was assured a central place in the war of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness.

That was a Garden of Eden for racist demagogues. Avigdor Lieberman could advocate the expulsion of the Arabs from Israel, Ellie Yishai could enact laws for the revocation of the citizenship of non-Jews. Obscure members of the Knesset could grab headlines with bills that might have been conceived in Nuremberg.

This Garden of Eden is no more. If we continue on our path, we will become a leper colony.

The tone makes the music — and this applies also to the president’s words on Israel and Palestine. He spoke at length about the Holocaust. He stressed Israel’s right to exist. And without pausing, he spoke about the suffering of the Palestinian refugees, the intolerable situation of the Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own.

He spoke respectfully about Hamas. He demanded that they recognize Israel and stop violence, but also hinted that he would welcome a Palestinian unity government.

The political message was clear and unequivocal: The two-state solution will be put into practice. He himself will see to that. Settlement activity must cease. Unlike his predecessors, he did not stop at speaking about “Palestinians”, but uttered the decisive word: “Palestine” — the name of a state and a territory.

And no less important: The Iran war has been struck from the agenda.

How did official Israel respond? “These are just words. So he talked. Nothing will come out of it.”

That is nonsense. The words of the president of the United States are more than just words. They are political facts.

It may take some time for the message to sink in. But after this speech, the pro-Israel lobby will never be the same as it was before. The sly dishonesty of a Shimon Peres, the guileful deceits of an Ehud Olmert, the sweet talking of a Bibi Netanyahu — all these belong to the past.

The Israeli people must now decide: Whether to follow the right-wing government toward an inevitable collision with Washington, as the Jews did 1940 years ago when they followed the Zealots into a suicidal war on Rome — or to join Obama’s march toward a new world.