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Varying Responses to Speech in Mideast Highlight Divisions
President Obama’s carefully balanced message was greeted warmly by his immediate audience in Cairo on Thursday and in some other parts of the Mideast, but there was also dismissiveness and frustration. And among Israelis and Palestinians, reactions to a message designed to open each side up to the other seemed rather to reflect the fractures between them.
Israelis and Palestinians picked at the content of the sweeping speech almost like a biblical text, finding reassuring passages and more ominous ones, depending on which side of their political spectrums they came from.
Israelis on the far right, for example, blasted Mr. Obama for what they said was his casting of an equivalency between the Holocaust and the suffering of Palestinians in two concurrent paragraphs of his lengthy address.
“How dare Obama compare Arab refugee suffering to the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust?” asked Aryeh Eldad, a parliamentarian from the rightist National Union Party, adding that Mr. Obama might understand the difference better when he visits the Buchenwald concentration camp in the coming days.
It was a mirror image of the reaction in Gaza, where Ahmed Youssef, the deputy foreign minister of the Hamas government, criticized the speech for not going far enough on Palestinian issues. “He points to the right of Israel to exist, but what about the refugees and their right of return?” Mr. Youssef said of Mr. Obama’s remarks, leaving out that Mr. Obama also said Palestine’s right to exist can’t be denied.
“As a legal specialist,” Mr. Youssef added, Mr. Obama “should know people are under occupation, and they can not recognize the state while they are under occupation, only afterwards. Why put pressure on Arabs and Muslims to recognize Israel while it is not recognizing our existence?”
At the same time, analysts and politicians on both sides also acknowledged there were no shortage of positive statements in the speech to buttress their own causes.
Israelis noted that that Mr. Obama referred to America’s bond with Israel as “unbreakable” and defined Israel as a “Jewish homeland,” an important point of contention with the Palestinians; they also appreciated his unequivocal condemnation of Palestinian resistance through violence, including rocket attacks, and his condemnation of Holocaust denial.
Palestinians noted that Mr. Obama plainly spoke of their own nation, calling it “Palestine,” and praised his willingness to acknowledge the depth of Palestinian suffering so deeply.
Many lines in Mr. Obama’s speech drew applause from the audience in the elegant Cairo University hall where it was held, but perhaps none so expressively as those lifted from the Koran, which emphasized Islam as a religion of justice and equality. The president’s respectful treatment of the religion, and his elegiac recounting of the achievements of Muslims through history, resonated strongly with many throughout the region, who seemed delighted by it.
Even those who took strong issue with some of the speech’s political points acknowledged that its tone, rhetoric, and overall sense of empathy were strikingly new.
“I think his performance was marvelous,” said Khalid al-Dakhil, a professor at King Saudi University in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “He seems so much more sympathetic, so much more understanding of the feelings, attitudes and perceptions of Arabs and Muslims. I think it was a speech with a vision, it was designed to set the stage for a new beginning.”
Even the way Mr. Obama began his speech, with his use of the phrase “peace be upon him” after mentioning the Prophet Muhammad, and his opening greeting — “Peace be upon you” in Arabic — struck a chord with many people, particularly in Saudi Arabia, the deeply conservative desert kingdom where Islam was born.
“Starting the speech with the words ‘salaam aleykum’ was a really good approach,” said Ghina Sibai, a 32-year-old art director from Beirut, Lebanon, in comments echoed by others across the Arab world. “It’s kind of like a peace treaty. He’s trying to address the Muslim world through its own culture.”
“He was trying to erase stereotypes about Islam,” said Marwan Kabalan, a professor of political science at Damascus University in Damascus, Syria. “It was the most tolerant speech I have ever heard by an American president concerning Islam and Muslims.”
Despite their admiration for Mr. Obama’s message and tone, however, some viewers in Syria, a nation with particularly strained ties to the United States, viewed the address through the region’s omnipresent strategic lens, saying they felt its softened tone was dictated partly by American weakness.
“The United States is in a weaker position now,” said Omar Amiralai, a well-known 65-year-old Syrian film maker. “They are stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan and don’t know how to get out. Bush, after the Iraq war, had some ability to pressure Sharon on Israeli settlements, but I don’t see that the United States has the ability to impose its law or desires on Israel now.”
Ayman Abdullah, a 47-year-old electrical engineer, was watching the speech live on large television screens along with dozens of others at the Rawda Cafe in Damascus. “The United States has lost power and popularity across the world, and this is really just a new kind of attempt to regain it, which probably won’t work,” he said.
There seemed, to some Arab viewers, a kind of blindness in Mr. Obama’s speech when it came to wars being conducted by the United States abroad, and a failure to acknowledge that the United States, too, was responsible for the deaths of innocents.
“What is astonishing is that he condemned violence, but he didn’t say a word about what the United States did in Iraq,” said Khalid Saghieh, the executive editor of al Akhbar, a Lebanese daily newspaper that leans towards Hezbollah. “If you want to call for a new beginning, you should at least apologize for tens of thousands of victims in Iraq.”
Other viewers, particularly in Syria, passed over Mr. Obama’s comments about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as political boilerplate, something the United States was duty bound to defend even if the facts remained inconclusive. They felt he placed all the blame for the violence on the Islamic militants, rather than acknowledging that they too were reacting to historic wrongs.
“All this talk of extremism it is a transitory phenomenon,” said Mr. Amiralai, the Syrian film maker. “It is a kind of foam that simply disguises the deeper sources of injustice in the Islamic world.”
But the subject that aroused the greatest interest by far was Israel and Palestine. Some gave Mr. Obama credit for being clearer and firmer than other American presidents about the need for Israel stop building settlements and to agree to a two-state solution. But most of the listeners also expressed a sense of urgency that Mr. Obama’s soaring language must be translated into new policies that would push Israel harder than the United States has in the past.
Some Arab listeners went further in their criticism, assailing Mr. Obama and accusing him of essentially repeating old American policies. The passage in which Mr. Obama talked about the Holocaust evoked little reaction, as many Arabs view that history — whether or not they doubt its veracity — as one that has often been invoked to justify the Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
“He wasn’t tough enough on Israel,” said Saoud Kabli, a 25-year-old columnist for the Saudi newspaper Watan. “He mentioned Muslim extremists, but he didn’t mention what the Israelis do to the Palestinians. What I was looking for on an intellectual level is a tough hand on the other side. There are Palestinians who suffer every day from what the Israelis are doing.”
Mr. Saghieh, the newspaper editor in Beirut, was harsher, saying Mr. Obama’s even-handed treatment of Israeli and Palestinian suffering was bound to anger people in this part of the world. He added that most Arabs would not agree with Mr. Obama’s categorical comments about the futility of violence, noting that American revolutionaries had used violence in their struggle for independence against Britain.
“There was a vague hint in the speech that Jerusalem can be place for all sons of Abraham,” Mr. Saghieh said. “But he did not address the two main issues, the status of Jerusalem and the issue of refugees.”
“I consider Mr. Obama’s speech a morphine injection to numb the minds of Muslim and Arab people,” said Mr. Abdullah, the Syrian electrical engineer, “so that they don’t mind so much the injustices carried out by the United States in the region, as long as Mr. Obama respects Islamic culture and heritage.”
In Cairo, where the speech was carried on national television and was widely watched, it seemed warmly appreciated as a step in the right direction, even if people still found in it many failures, oversights, missteps and flaws.
“It was honest, is the first word that comes to mine,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, an independent human rights organization.
Mr. Bahgat, who attended the speech, said that one of the most important elements of the speech was what was left out. “I think it was remarkable the speech left out the term terrorism completely,” he said. “It may have been a paradigm shift for the U.S. away from using this politically charged word.”
Others analysts said that Mr. Obama clearly went as far as he could, given that his allies are the leaders of the region and that Israel is a close strategic partner. He spoke about freedom, democracy, human rights and even criticized Israel on its expansion of settlements. For that, they said, he left the hall appreciated and a rock star; but they also cautioned that the glow will soon fade if it is not followed up, quickly, with deeds.
“What is the next step we can witness which can make American policies different from what they used to be?” said Mansoor al-Jamri, the editor of a Bahraini newspaper, Al Wasat, and a member of one of the kingdom’s most prominent Shiite families. “There has got to be actual steps to confirm all these declarations of intent. What is the next step, thank you very much.” Reprinted from the New York Times. For more news and information, click the link below for the www.nytimes.com. Support the New York Times and your local newspaper.
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem; Robert W. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon; and Michael Slackman from Cairo. Reporting was contributed by Taghreed El-Khodary from Gaza; Hwaida Saad from Beirut; Muhammad al-Milfy from Riyadh; Omar al-Mani from Damascus, Syria; and Sharon Otterman from New York.
Varying Responses to Speech in Mideast Highlight Divisions – NYTimes.com.
