THIS week I enjoyed an hour of happiness. I was on my way home, after collecting William Polk’s new book about Iran. I admire the wisdom of this former State Department official.
I was walking on the seaside promenade, when I was seized by a desire to go down to the seashore. I sat down on a chair on the sand, sipped a coffee and smoked an Arab water-pipe. It was 68 years ago, in exactly the same spot. I remember the book I was reading: Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West”, a forbidding tome that painted an entirely new picture of world history.
Every so often I laid down the volume, in order to absorb the new insights. Then, too, I looked toward Jaffa, at that time still an Arab town.
Spengler asserted that every civilization lives for about a 1,000 years, creating in the end a world empire, and that thereafter a new civilization takes its place. In his view, Western civilization was about to create a German world empire after which the next civilization would be Russian. He was right and he was wrong: A world empire was about to be born, but it was American, and the next civilization will probably be Chinese.
Meanwhile America is ruling the world, and that leads us, naturally, to President Barack Obama. I listened to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. My first impression was that it was almost impertinent: To come to a peace ceremony and there to justify war. But when I read it for the second and then a third time, I found some undeniable truths. I, too, believe that there are limits to nonviolence. No nonviolence would have stopped Hitler. The trouble is that this insight serves very often as a pretext for aggression. Everyone who starts a stupid war pretends that there is no alternative.
Obama tries to stick the “no alternative” label onto the Afghan war — a cruel, superfluous and stupid war if ever there was one, very much like our own last three military adventures. But his observations deserve reflection. They invite, and indeed demand, debate. But it was odd to hear them on the occasion of the award of a peace prize. It would have been more proper to voice them at West Point, where he spoke a week earlier.
IWOULD have expected Obama to use his speech to present a real worldwide vision, instead of sad reflections on human nature and the inevitability of war. As the president of the United States, on such a festive occasion, with all of humanity listening, he should have underlined the necessity for the new world order that must come into being in the course of the 21st century.
The swine flu provides an example of how a fatal phenomenon can spread all over the globe within days. Icebergs that melt at the North Pole cause Indian Ocean islands to be submerged. The crash of the housing market in Chicago causes hundreds of thousands of children in Africa to die of hunger. The planet has become one entity. A leader who is also a philosopher should outline ways to create a binding world order, an order that will consign wars as a means of solving problems to the past, abolish tyrannical regimes in every country and pave the road to a world without hunger and epidemics.
Obama must surely be thinking about this. But he represents a country that obstructs so many important aspects of a binding world order. It is natural for a world empire to object to a world order that would limit its powers and transfer them to world institutions. That’s why the US opposes the world court and impedes the worldwide effort for saving the planet and the elimination of all nuclear arms. That’s why it objects to real world governance to replace the UN, which has almost become an instrument of US policy. That’s why he praises NATO, a military arm of the US, and obstructs the arising of a really effective international force.
THE Norwegian decision to award Obama the Nobel Peace Prize bordered on the ridiculous. In his Oslo speech, Obama made no effort to provide, post factum, a plausible justification for this decision. After all, it is not a prize designed not for words but for deeds.
When he was elected as president, we were ready for some disappointment. We knew that no politician could really be as perfect as Obama the candidate looked and sounded. But the disappointment is much greater and much more painful than anticipated.
It covers practically all possible areas. He has not yet left Iraq, but plunged with both feet deeper into the Afghan quagmire. Anyone who looks for some sense in this war will search in vain. It is being fought against the wrong enemy — the Afghan people, instead of the Al-Qaeda organization. Rather like burning a house down to rid it of mice.
He promised to close Guantanamo and the other torture camps but they are still in business. He promised salvation to the masses of the unemployed in his country, but poured money into the pockets of the fat cats who are as predatory and gluttonous as ever. His contribution to the solution of the climate crisis is mainly verbal, as is his commitment to the destruction of weapons of mass destruction.
True, the rhetoric has changed. The sanctimonious arrogance of the Bush days has been replaced by a more reconciliatory style and the appearance of a search for fair agreement. This should be duly appreciated. But not unduly. As an Israeli, I am naturally interested in his attitude to our conflict. When he was elected, he aroused great, even exaggerated hopes, but the disappointment matched the hopes. In all the long Oslo speech, Obama devoted 16 whole words to us: “We see it in Middle East, as the conflict between Arabs and Jews seems to harden.”
Well, first of all, it is not a conflict between Arabs and Jews. It is between Palestinians and Israelis. That is an important difference: when one wants to solve a problem, one must first have a clear picture of it.
If the conflict is indeed hardening, the US, and Obama personally, must carry much of the blame. His folding up on the settlement issue and his total surrender to the pro-Israel lobby in the US has encouraged our government to believe that it can do anything it likes.
At the beginning, Benjamin Netanyahu was worried about the new president. But the fear has dissipated, and now our government is treating Obama and his people with scorn bordering on contempt. The agreements made with the last administration are being broken quite openly.
President George W. Bush recognized the “settlement blocs” in return for an undertaking to freeze all the others permanently and to dismantle the outposts set up since March 2001. Not only has not a single outpost been dismantled, but this week the government accorded the status of “preferred area” to dozens of settlements outside the “blocs”, including the worst Kahanist nests.
The “freeze” is a joke. In this theater of the absurd, the settlers take part in a performance of violent opposition that is both invited and paid for by the government.
In Jerusalem the settlement activity is in full swing. Palestinian families are thrown out of their homes to the jubilant cries of the settlers, and the few Israeli protesters against the injustice are sent to hospitals and prisons. The settler groups engaged in these activities receive donations from the US that are tax-deductible — thus Obama is indirectly paying for the very acts he condemns.
And Obama? Oybama.
