David Remnick: Homelands

[babylonsister]

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2009/01/12/090112taco_talk_remnick

Homelands
by David Remnick January 12, 2009

snip//

Now there remains only the occasion of Obama’s Inaugural Address before he will put to the test his capacity to reconcile forces and historical actors far beyond his experiences in Cambridge, Hyde Park, Capitol Hill, and Oahu. As if the hydra-headed economic disaster and the heightened tension between nuclear Pakistan and nuclear India were not enough to quicken the pulse, the Bush era is ending, and the Obama era is opening, with yet another conflagration in the most intractable, faith-dazed, and history-inflamed spot on earth. With the end of an uneasy six-month truce, the agents of Hamas immediately began firing rockets, dozens of them a day, into the population centers of southern Israel. As the Palestinian journalist Daoud Kuttab writes in the Washington Post, the Hamas leadership had lost much of its support in Gaza and knew that the only way to regain it was to reëstablish itself as “the heroic resister.” In return, the Israeli government––now in the run-up to a national election––unleashed its F-16s and helicopter gunships. As in so many instances in the past half century—the Lebanon War of 1982, the “Iron Fist” response to the 1988 intifada, the Lebanon War of 2006—the Israelis have reacted to intolerable acts of terror with a determination to inflict terrible pain, to teach the enemy a lesson. The civilian suffering and deaths are inevitable; the lessons less so.

On June 4th, the day after Obama clinched enough delegates to win the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, he spoke at a session of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, with the intention of assuring American Jews of his allegiances. Once more, he invoked his own story and told of how, when he was eleven, he first learned about Jewish traditions, history, and the “dreams of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds”:

The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black; he was from Kenya, he had left when I was two. My mother was white and she was from Kansas, and I’d moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways, I didn’t know where I came from. So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional, and cultural identity. And I understood the Zionist idea—that there is always a homeland at the center of our story.

As President, Obama will have to address another dream of homeland––the unrealized dream of the Palestinians. In the West Bank, he will be dealing with a leadership that, while imperfect, supports the overdue justice of a two-state resolution. The same is true in Israel, at least with those politicians to the left of Benjamin Netanyahu. But in Gaza Obama will be dealing, directly or not, with political actors who, with Iranian support, seek ceaseless battle with Israel, and may even hope to destabilize Egypt.

Soon after George W. Bush came to office, eight years ago, he told a confidant that “there’s no Nobel Peace Prize to be had” in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. He turned his attention instead to places farther east in the Middle East, with mostly horrific results. But, as Obama told his listeners at AIPAC last June, there remains the Talmudic imperative of tikkun olam, “the obligation to repair the world.” In four years, or eight, he may well have won no Nobel medal, made no final repair. But the obligation of constant engagement is deep; the cost of negligence is paid in blood. And, what is more, history has proved that the seemingly impossible can be achieved: the Irish and the English have all but resolved a conflict that began in the days of Oliver Cromwell, and on January 20th an African-American President will cross the color line and move into the White House––a house that slaves helped build. ♦