Update: Support for my point of view on the speech, with other substantive arguments, comes from Gershom Gurenberg in "Don't Be Naive. That Speech Was a Revolution."
President Obama's trip to the Middle East was historic and heartening. On a day he visited with both Palestinian and Israeli young people, he made a speech to a mostly young audience in Jerusalem that reaffirmed the moral solidarity of the U.S. with Israel, but also spoke of the humanity of the Palestinian peoples.
"So peace is necessary. But peace is also just... Put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own. (Applause.) Living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. (Applause.) It’s not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; or restricting a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or displace Palestinian families from their homes. (Applause.) Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. (Applause.) Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land. (Applause.)"
President Obama's support of Israeli was gratefully acknowledged by Israeli's prime minister, he was given the country's highest honor which no other U.S. President has received, and he crucially brokered a thaw in tense relations between Israel and Turkey. But his real accomplishment in this trip, and in that speech, probably won't be fully understood for years.
What everyone in the Middle East saw was an American President talking about the just aspirations and human rights of both Israelis and in great detail Palestinians--to an audience in Israel, to the applause of that audience. This is a real moment.
The current leaders of Israel and the Arab countries saw and heard what that young audience felt and believed. They want peace, democracy and a two state solution.
This does not even suggest that a two state solution is imminent, even though everyone has wearily known for decades that it is the only solution. It does suggest that if the region and the world doesn't fall apart first, the two state solution is coming.
Or as Gorenberg concludes: "Yet to continue to repeat all the reasons that a process can't work because it hasn't worked before is to take the naïve, pessimistic view that change never happens, that new methods never work, that people are trapped by history and can't resolve conflicts. If that naïve attitude were true, Barack Obama would never have had the opportunity to speak as the president of the United States.
One speech doesn't make a peace process. But as the beginning of a process, this speech was a revolution."
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