Montgomery to Ramallah
President Obama’s June 4 address in Cairo to the Muslim world has by now been thoroughly parsed, analyzed and critiqued with Talmudic intensity. Stunning and significant, the address also left some listeners wanting more — more about their pain and others’ responsibilities. Some complained about things that were in the speech, and some complained about things that were missing.
Many Jews have expressed a justified concern that Obama linked the founding of Israel entirely to the Holocaust, omitting any reference to decades of Zionist thought and advocacy, never mind the hard work of building the land that has been our spiritual and physical home for millennia. Whether that was an intentional misreading of history, or an unintentional slight, probably depends on one’s view of the president.
In the rush to note what wasn’t in the speech, however, an important point may have been overlooked. For an African-American president to bring up race in the context of a major speech to the Muslim world was brave and risky. Obama did it anyway.
“Palestinians must abandon violence,” he said. “Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.”
Violence, he went on to say, “is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.”
For years, many have wondered why Palestinians have not adopted the tactics of nonviolence from the American civil rights movement, and here Obama gave public voice to that point, without qualification.
The two struggles are not analogous; the comparison can go too far. But though history never precisely repeats itself, it serves us up lessons and challenges. “Pure nonviolence could tell Israelis that Palestinians are willing to live next to them,” Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg wrote recently. “Sainthood can work. Britain abandoned India; Montgomery’s buses were desegregated.”
Wondering why “there is no Palestinian Gandhi,” Gorenberg imagines an elaborate scene of Palestinian nonviolent protest and Israeli reaction, all leading to possible negotiation. Fantasy, he acknowledges. But now, thanks to the speech in Cairo, someone else has given voice to such imaginings, too.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
