C O L U M N S

The commonest reaction to Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo last week has been the most obvious one: that words are not enough.

In fact, the US president acknowledged as much himself, saying: ‘Words alone cannot meet the needs of our people. These needs will be met only if we act boldly in the years ahead.’

No one can reasonably deny, however, that the speech in several ways measured up to the hype that preceded it. It contained a number of thoughts and ideas that billions of people have long yearned to hear from an American head of state, as well as sentences that could not convincingly have been uttered by a different president.

It isn’t difficult to dismiss with a degree of contempt the reaction of the far right in the US, some of whose organs took exception even to the fact that Obama began his address with the traditional Muslim greeting. Marc Thiessen, a former speechwriter for George W, was on equally weak ground when he commented: ‘President Bush would never have criticised our military or our intelligence community on foreign soil. [Obama] basically threw our military under the bus in front of a Muslim audience.’

For better or for worse, he did no such thing. He mentioned only in passing his strictures against torture and the decision to close down the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Obama did describe the invasion of Iraq as ‘a war of choice’ — which is about the kindest thing anyone could reasonably say about that conflict.

Another strand of criticism has focused on what Obama had to say about the Palestinian-Israeli situation: the Zionist Organisation of America characterised his comments as ‘strongly biased’ and its president, Morton Klein, said the president’s remarks ‘may well signal the beginning of a renunciation of America’s strategic alliance with Israel’. If only the latter were indeed the case! Obama’s take on that conflict was, if not exactly unexceptionable, at least decidedly an advance on the perceptions of his predecessors. He was unequivocal on the subject of America’s bond with Israel, but at the same time characterised the position of the Palestinians as ‘intolerable’. The significance of that word cannot lightly be dismissed.

Obama was uncompromising on Israel’s right to exist, tracing the aspiration for a Jewish homeland to the history of European anti-Semitism and, inevitably, the Holocaust. It would have been good to hear him concede that the European Judeocide spearheaded by the Nazis was by no stretch of the imagination a crime perpetrated by Palestinians. He did not do that, but he did suggest that the latter’s right to an independent homeland is at least as valid as any claim to Jewish statehood.

He acknowledged also that Hamas enjoys a degree of popular support. And he pulled few punches in excoriating the expansion of Jewish settlements on occupied territory. He must, no doubt, have heard Israeli spokesmen claim that Bush acquiesced orally to a so-called freeze on settlements not actually limiting their growth. According to a report in The New York Times, quoting Israeli officials, ‘Israel agreed to the road map and to move ahead with the removal of settlements and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 on the understanding that settlement growth [in the West Bank] would continue.’

That this ‘understanding’ was not put into writing suggests the Bush administration was aware of its indefensibility. It’s also worth noting that whereas Obama is reasonably clear-cut in his opposition to the enlargement of settlements, he has had little to say about the illegitimacy, under international law, of the existing encroachments on Palestinian territory, which have been spreading under successive Israeli governments for the past four decades. And, enumerating another sin of omission, Noam Chomsky has pointed out that the president made no mention of the United States’ ‘decisive role in sustaining the current conflict’.

He’s on somewhat less solid ground, however, in claiming that ‘Obama gave no indication’ that the US role ‘should change or even be considered’. After all, the tenor of Obama’s speech is open to interpretation as a small but nonetheless vital deviation from the norm whereby US officials are uncompromisingly reluctant to concede their nation’s penchant for wrongdoing. The incumbent’s contrition tends to be implicit rather than explicit, and one cannot seriously expect him to catalogue the war crimes the US has committed or been complicit in over the decades, but it’s nonetheless a promising beginning.

It could, of course, be argued that his concession in Cairo that ‘in some cases’ the ‘fear and anger’ provoked by 9/11 ‘led us to act contrary to our traditions and ideals’ was, at best, an inaccurate understatement, given that these traditions include a number of the 20th century’s most egregious follies, while the ideals have invariably been upheld by dissidents such as those who agitated for racial equality or demanded an end to the Vietnam War. It would nonetheless be churlish not to recognise that, notwithstanding its shortcomings, Obama’s willingness to revisit, albeit superficially, the darkness in America’s dealings with the world is a small but important step forward. Hopefully, it will not be followed by two steps back.

In his Cairo speech, he lamented the effects of colonialism and the tendencies of the Cold War years, and specifically regretted his country’s role in toppling Iran’s Mossadegh government in the 1950s. He acknowledged also the futility of expecting that there could exclusively be a military solution to the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He touched on issues such as nuclear disarmament, democratisation and women’s rights without most of the arrogance associated with official American pronouncements on these topics. And he demonstrated that support for Palestinian rights and aspirations is not incompatible with recognising the monstrous crimes committed against European Jews.

‘Not exactly Gettysburg,’ concluded Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent. ‘Not exactly Churchill, but not bad.’ Even Hamas leader Khaled Meshal felt obliged to concede that ‘undoubtedly Obama speaks a new language’. Pre-emptive recorded speeches by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri hinted that they were panicked by the prospect of Obama’s overture to Muslims. But the predictably twisted responses of Islamist and Zionist extremists only contribute to Obama’s credibility.

Although it would be fatuous to deny that the scope for scepticism about the likelihood of constructive change in the Middle East has only marginally been diminished by Obama’s carefully crafted and eloquently delivered peroration, there is now at least a glimmer of hope where none existed before. And, furthermore, no one in the audience deemed it appropriate to fling their footwear at the president of the United States.

By Mahir Ali