Two weeks ago, at a speech to AIPAC that I attended, Barack
Obama declared that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel,
and it must remain undivided." The very next day, amid objection
from Palestinians, Obama backtracked and said the status of
Jerusalem would have to be determined by negotiations.
Now Reuters
reports that a top Obama adviser is doing cartwheels to try to
explain the about face:
Daniel Kurtzer, who advises Obama on the Middle
East, said Tuesday at the Israel Policy Forum that Obama's comment
stemmed from "a picture in his mind of Jerusalem before 1967 with
barbed wires and minefields and demilitarized zones."
"So he used a word to represent what he did not want to see
again, and then realized afterwards that that word is a code word
in the Middle East," Kurtzer said.
In other words, Obama is such an expert on the Middle East that he
has a vivid picture of what Jerusalem looked like when he was a
five-year old living in Hawaii, and yet in a major speech about
that very region he has such expertise on, he bungles the language
on one of its most hotly-contested issues.
It gets better:
Kurtzer said it was unfortunate that so much time
was being spent dwelling on one word of a 30-minute speech, "but it
does not indicate any kind of naivete about foreign
affairs."
Much of the debate over Obama's stance on Israel has focused on
whether he is pro or anti, but perhaps a better question to ask is
how much damage his careless use of language would do to the
region. Over the course of the campaign, his statements have sent
so many mixed signals, that people have drawn wildly different
conclusions as to his true intentions. While this may allow him to
skate through the campaign, the tendency would be absolutely
disastrous should he carry out such policies as president, because
ambiguous signals from the West have been a central problem all
along. For instance, both sides claim that the British promised a
state to their side earlier in this century. And one of the most
disputed U.N. resolutions of all time, written after the Six Day
War, calls for "withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories
occupied in the recent conflict…" Arabs contend that this
means that Israel must withdraw from all territories, but the
clause was negotiated so as to specifically avoid the definite
article "the" (as in "the territories conquered"), thus allowing
Israel to maintain some border flexibility. The point is that this
single clause has been the subject of fierce debate for over 40
years.
So to borrow a line from Obama himself, don't tell me that words
don't matter!
topics:
Israel
