Obama denounces Holocaust denial, loses Arab students

The Times Lede blog has a fascinating set of responses to Obama's speech from Arab students. For the most part, they appreciated Obama's courage and directness and gestures of respect; their responses are nuanced and complex.

Deeply disturbing, though, are students' reactions to Obama's discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Three out five students who reacted to this issue rejected Obama's attempt to be even-handed, specifically his parallel treatment of Jewish and Palestinian suffering. One of these three negative reactions was overtly antisemitic, a second implicitly so. All three reacted angrily at what they saw as an insinuation that Israel's existence was justified by Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

Obama did not say that. But he seemed to. These reactions, prejudiced though they are, highlight a lacuna in Obama's presentation that did register with me* when I heard it:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

There's almost a sleight-of-hand in this passage that sits oddly with its brutal honesty. First, the passive construction "the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries" avoids saying who persecuted them, e.g., perhaps, Muslims as well as Christians. Then comes the statement of Holocaust fact, followed by the assertion that Holocaust denial is poisonous, and then by a claim that Holocaust denial prevents peace -- apparently, Obama seems to imply, by further traumatizing traumatized Israeli minds.

What's missing is a statement of why Israel has a right to exist. Perhaps such a statement should not be necessary. But Obama did come near enough to suggesting that its justification lay in the Holocaust to make the absence of an explicit justification felt. And into that gap rushed the inference that the Holocaust was the reason that Arabs should accept Israel's existence -- which touched a raw nerve in these three students. Here are excerpts from their reactions, starting with a weirdly "doublethought" Holocaust denial:

Tarek Hefni

Tarek Hefni, 20, is a student of computer science at Cairo University from Giza, Egypt

I did not feel very comfortable regarding the two state solution and regarding treating the Holocaust as a fact. It is still a debatable issue and should not be taken as granted....

Lede Blog Editor's Note:We asked Tarek to clarify his objection to President Obama’s statement that the Holocaust is a fact in his speech today in Cairo. Here is what he told us:

I admit a genocide has taken place! That’s a fact. However, the numbers are really doubtful. I also don’t see any relevance between people being killed by other nation and building a homeland in a different land. Again the genocide did take place. I just doubt the numbers.

Kholoud Khalifa Kholoud Khalifa, 22, who majored in journalism at the American University in Cairo and describes herself as an “Egyptian-Austrian Muslim,” watched the speech in Mohandesien, Egypt.

I was troubled by his words regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict and those on democracy. The others were okay, they were expected — violent extremism in all of its forms didn’t really hit a nerve. Iran’s nuclear controversy is just filling white space, but claiming the Holocaust justifies a Jewish homeland and then saying it’s wrong too, what was it? Oh, uttering the same about Jews because it revokes past emotions is atrocious. For 60 years the Palestinians have been displaced, killed and terrorized and it’s disparaging to think of it as a tragic event rather than a genocide. To me, that thought confirms only one thing — his views of Palestinians are no different to those of Zionists.

Riham El Houshi

Where Obama really lost us is Palestine. He didn’t beat around the bush, at least, and made it clear right away that the American bond with Israel was unbreakable.

But he has clearly failed to understand that the problem Muslims have is not seeing both sides of the conflict, but seeing the conflict in historical context. I can safely say that Muslims do not and never will feel responsible for the Holocaust, and do not think it justifies setting up a Jewish state upon Palestinian lands. Lands, which, have shrunk over the decades as settlements have continued to rise and more and more territory has been annexed.

And despite the beauty of the words he used about Jerusalem, it was heavily symbolic talk about a messy issue. Palestinians and Israeli may agree on everything, but they will never relinquish their rights to Jerusalem as the capital of their respective nations.

It must be said, too, that two of the six students published by The Lede accepted Obama's assertion that a two-state solution is necessary. But still, there's a frightening glimpse here of the depth of hatred for Israel among educated young Arabs. Obama, for his part, should be commended for directly confronting Arab anti-semitism. But he needs to rethink the sequencing of fact, logic and association with which he served up this root of bitterness today.

* I must confess to conveniently forgetting this perception while writing the prior post.

UPDATE: The Times reports a Muslim Brotherhood official's reaction very similar to that of the students cited above:

...in Jordan, Rohile Gharaibeh, deputy secretary general for the Islamic Action Front, the political party of the Muslim Brotherhood, rejected any reference to the Holocaust. “The Holocaust was not the doing of the Muslims, it was the Europeans, and it should not come at the cost of the Palestinian people or the Arabs and Muslims,” he said.

More on Obama's speeches:
2029: Look back in wonder
The Gospel according to Obama
What Will.i.am had to work with

An honest broker for Israelis and Palestinians

It's often said that in the Bush years the U.S. lost credibility as an even-handed mediator in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. So among the many extraordinary balancings and tensions confronted in Obama's speech to the Muslim world today, it's worth noting that his paired precis of the plights of Israelis and Palestinians was balanced almost literally to the last syllable:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

Word count for the first paragraph: 108. For the second: 107. That literally equal allocation was surely not entirely conscious, but parallelism it reflects must be deliberate. Nor is it accidental that grievances are cited for Jews, Muslims and Christians. Evoking the religious groups' suffering picks up on a the speech's central theme: conflicts that go back decades and centuries must be confronted, and that they can be resolved on the basis of values shared by all three religions - and by all civilizations.

Indeed, the speech as a whole was based on those principles, laid out at the beginning: speak the truth, confront tensions openly, resolve them on the basis of shared values. Obama laid out hard truths for every interested party, including Israelis and Palestinians:

Palestinians must abandon violence. 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. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It's a story with a simple truth: that violence 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.

Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist.

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.

At present, the force behind this semantic even-handedness comes from the Obama administration's unequivocal insistence that Israeli settlement growth must stop. That's the new element in the equation. How the emerging confrontation with the Netanyahu government on this issue plays out will go a long way toward determining how this speech will be viewed in retrospect.