Why Would Obama Say Such a Thing?

Incredibly, I heard on the radio this morning an interview, conducted by a seemingly intelligent reporter for National Public Radio, of a seemingly intelligent political analyst, concerning the recent events to do with the Middle East. Under discussion was the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington, where he met with President Obama (before the latter's departure for a visit to his ancestral home in Moneygall, Ireland; yes, we forget that his heritage is as much European as it is African), addressed a pro-Israel lobbying group, and spoke to a joint session of congress. The dust-up of particular interest to the radio pundits was because President Obama, speaking last week in anticipation of Netanyahu's visit, and with an eye toward the current climate of rebellion and reform in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East, said, near the end of his speech:

For over two years, my administration has worked with the parties and the international community to end this conflict, building on decades of work by previous administrations. Yet expectations have gone unmet. Israeli settlement activity continues. Palestinians have walked away from talks. The world looks at a conflict that has grinded on and on and on, and sees nothing but stalemate. Indeed, there are those who argue that with all the change and uncertainty in the region, it is simply not possible to move forward now. 

White House photo
by Lawrence Jackson

I disagree. At a time when the people of the Middle East and North Africa are casting off the burdens of the past, the drive for a lasting peace that ends the conflict and resolves all claims is more urgent than ever. That's certainly true for the two parties involved. 

For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won't create an independent state. Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection. And Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist.
As for Israel, our friendship is rooted deeply in a shared history and shared values. Our commitment to Israel's security is unshakeable. And we will stand against attempts to single it out for criticism in international forums. But precisely because of our friendship, it's important that we tell the truth: The status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace. 

The fact is, a growing number of Palestinians live west of the Jordan River. Technology will make it harder for Israel to defend itself. A region undergoing profound change will lead to populism in which millions of people -– not just one or two leaders -- must believe peace is possible. The international community is tired of an endless process that never produces an outcome. The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation. 

Now, ultimately, it is up to the Israelis and Palestinians to take action. No peace can be imposed upon them -- not by the United States; not by anybody else. But endless delay won't make the problem go away. What America and the international community can do is to state frankly what everyone knows -- a lasting peace will involve two states for two peoples: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people, each state enjoying self-determination, mutual recognition, and peace. 

So while the core issues of the conflict must be negotiated, the basis of those negotiations is clear: a viable Palestine, a secure Israel. The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states. The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their full potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.

Israeli Prime Minister
Benyamin Netanyahu
(State Department photo)

The reference to the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiation lit up Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has decided to start referring to them as The Indefensible 1967 Borders, a tactic that panders to unthinking people everywhere.

The question the reporter asked, for which the political analyst had no ready answer was, Given the political situation in this country, why would President Obama make a controversial reference to the 1967 borders as a basis for an agreed peace between Israel and its Palestinian neighbours? He gets nothing out of it. They seemed unable to fathom any reason for this statement.

I think I know the answer, and I think it was a wise and judicious thing for Obama to do. (I often think I'm alone among Republicans in thinking Obama wise and judicious, especially in comparison to the reactionary-pandering, fatuous, simpering, spineless, gutless wonders my own party keeps vomiting up for the entertainment of Fox "News" interviewers.) 

Israel has, rightly, long enjoyed great and essentially unwavering support from the United States. We have been that nation's champion since its founding in 1948; we have backed it, even when its positions have been questionable, in every one of its conflicts with its neighbours. Each presidential administration since Truman's has understood that Israel, unlike its neighbours, is under existential threat: intractable elements throughout the region, from Islamabad to Fez, from Damascus to Sa'na, want the State of Israel wiped off the face of the earth. With that kind of threat facing it, Israel is entitled to greater deference in our dealings with it and its neighbours. 

But Israel, in the last decade or so, has begun to lose the moral high ground it held in American thought since 1948. Ultra-conservative forces within Israel have begun to assert themselves with greater success, forcing what they call a "Greater Israel" on the world. The ongoing Jewish settlement of lands in the West Bank, outside the 1967 borders, is a part of that push for an enlarged Jewish state. But each new settlement, each additional hectare of land taken from the Palestinians by Israeli settlers, is a new affront to the prospect for eventual peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Israel knows this, but its weak governments have been unable to find the backbone needed to prevent further encroachments on the West Bank. American governments have repeatedly warned Israel that this nation will not support this eating away of the land that will, in some fashion, someday be an Arab state of Palestine; the Israelis, though, apologise, maybe pause, and continue to build. 

Obama's statement that the 1967 border is a starting point for negotiations has long been acknowledged by all responsible parties. For my own part, I agree with that, and I would go further and say that wars have consequences, and the Palestinians much accept that the wars fought and lost in 1948 and 1956 and 1967 and 1973 mean that Israel's annexation of Jerusalem must be accepted as fact. They won it, and it is theirs. 

Palestinians must accept, too, that they were offered their own state at the same time the Israelis were, in 1948, but they chose to make war instead. They lost, and they must accept the consequences of their decision, or their fathers' decision. The refugees who fled the nascent State of Israel in 1948, and their children born in refugee camps throughout the region, and in neighbouring states, many of whom have never set foot in Israel, must accept that they have no right to return to ancestral homes in Israel. Whether they have any right to return at all must depend upon their willingness to accept the status within the Israeli political structure that is offered to them — a status that, because they are not Jews and Israel is by definition a Jewish state, is likely to be what we would consider second-class citizenship for some time into the future. (Westerners who find that likelihood opprobrious should look to the status of non-believers in Islamic nations throughout Africa and Asia, or to the status of Catholics in the British colonies that became the United States, and accept that our notions of inclusive democracy are not universally shared. We may well be morally superior, but we are not the ones who make the decisions or live with the results.)

By reminding the Israelis that the 1967 borders are the starting point, and that their continuing incursions into the West Bank have never had our support, Obama is, wisely and judiciously, warning the Israelis that American backing has its limits, and that they have continually tested those limits for decades. Incursions, like wars, have consequences.

A Story

Music

The day after Lester died, Emma heard music.


Her first thought was that it was pretty, but before she could decide why it was pretty, she realized how extraordinary it was just to hear music. The old, untuned piano had sat silently in the day room for the entire seven years she had worked there, and never once had anyone struck two consecutive tuneful notes on it. It was just where David sat.


He had been eight when Emma came to work there, and already a resident for three years. He spent every day sitting at the piano, not touching it, never trying the notes, not seeing anything. Just sitting, staring at the window beyond the closed case of the instrument. Mary Ann, the Supervising Nurse, said that when he first discovered the piano, he had played every note, from lowest to highest, slowly, deliberately, one time each and one after the other, as if memorizing their sound. He would take a seat there early each morning, and strike the lowest note, then the next, and the next, and when after several long minutes he finally reached the top, he would start over at the bottom, again and again, all day long, until at last Lester put a stop to it.


Lester had lived at the hospital for longer than anyone could remember. He alternated between sitting in an upholstered chair in the day room, muttering things no one understood, and shouting profanities and curses at his fellow residents, the nurses, the attendants, the walls, the furniture. And one day, about the time Emma first came to work there, Lester, who had been sitting in his chair muttering, stood and began cursing the light fixtures on the ceiling, then strode purposefully to the piano and slammed the lid down on David’s hand. Mary Ann said it broke a bone just above the left index finger.


David hadn’t touched the keys since that day. Instead, he would hold his finger over each key in turn, hovering in the air, as if he had struck it, as if he heard the vibrations of the string die away. His right foot would rise and fall on one of the pedals, relentlessly, but to no effect except the sound of something moving inside. He did this every day, all day; and then, for no reason, about three years ago he stopped. He spent each day after that still at the piano, but just sitting, hands in his lap, staring out the window, or with eyes closed, staring at something within himself.


He never spoke. No one in the hospital had ever heard his voice. He never cried, or laughed, never made a sound, never even produced the incomprehensible sounds so common among the hospital’s residents. He submitted to being dressed and undressed and bathed and fed by the attendants, but in unbroken silence. He could hear well enough, of that they were sure, and he understood them when they spoke to him. They knew that, because they would remind him to go to the bathroom, and he would go. When they told him it was time for lunch, he would follow the others to the dining room and sit, placid, while each spoon- or fork-ful was brought to his mouth. If no one fed him, he simply sat. If they remembered to tell him he was finished, he would go back to the piano and sit for the rest of the day. If they forgot, he would sit in the dining room until someone noticed him and told him he could leave. If they gave him water he drank it; if they didn’t, he did without.


He had been a beautiful young child when Emma first came, and it had pained her to imagine the sadness of his life, being lived out in such a strange madness. His blond straight hair, his smooth pale skin, his green-blue unseeing eyes. And in the years since she had come to the hospital, David had grown into a handsome young man of fifteen, almost sixteen, existing in silence in his room and the day room and the dining room and the bathroom, and in his own closed mind.


Doctors came and examined him from time to time, and postulated theories, and made recommendations and wrote prescriptions and ordered treatments, but it never made a difference. Oh, a drug might make him sleep more, or less, and one had made him sway back and forth, but nothing ever changed the way he behaved, the detached way he responded to instructions, the way he sat, hour after hour, at the piano.


Emma took him for walks from time to time, around the hospital grounds, talking to him, pointing at trees and shrubs and flowers, urging him to notice. She would take his hand and say “Come with me, David,” in as cheerful a voice as anyone has ever used with a child, and lead him out the door, down the porch stairs, across the gravel drive, off into the grass. Sometimes she took off his slippers so he would feel the cool grass between his toes. She often used to think some response was just about to dawn, a look in his eyes, awareness, confusion, surprise, but none ever did. If she walked, he followed; if she stopped, he stopped. If she walked away from him, he stood silent and patient, until she returned and took him back in, or told him to go back. If she said “Let’s go inside now,” he would follow her. If she waited, he waited. But if she said, “Go back in now,” he would go by himself. She didn’t understand how he could know the difference and seem to know nothing else.


A year ago, maybe a little more, there had been another change. Now, instead of sitting silent and unmoving at the piano, he would hold both hands above the keys, fingers spread, slowly moving each finger as if playing. At first Emma had watched when she could spare the time, to see if there were some pattern to the movement. He seemed to play the same thing over and over, his left hand stretched wide, his right hand moving in place, thumb, middle finger, little finger, over and over, then moving to hover over different notes and moving in the same pattern, then in different patterns, but almost always from left to right, from low notes to higher.


Every few days she would take a few minutes to watch, and after several months noticed that the patterns traced by his fingers and hands had become more and more complex over time, as if he were composing an etude, and adding to it with the passing days. She could stand beside him, or in front of him, or behind him, and it made no difference to him. Did he not care that she watched him, she wondered, or did he simply not grasp it? She couldn’t tell.


She took to watching from across the piano, watching his face for some shiver of consciousness. Was he hearing an imagined sound from the notes he pretended to play? If he was, did it have some kind of meaning for him? But his look never changed from the vacant stare, his gaze never wavered from the bright rectangle of light through the window. He never looked down at the keys, never looked in her direction, never turned his head, never showed the slightest animation in his features. Occasionally he would stop suddenly, sometimes putting his hands down in his lap, as if he had made a mistake or reached an impasse, but soon he would start again, seemingly from the beginning of whatever he imagined he heard.


Whatever it was, it seemed to last about four or five minutes. She had timed him for a few weeks, and each time, whatever he was doing, he would do it for about that long, then pause, then start again. When he stopped before that time was up, he would put his hands in his lap, as if thinking. If he went the full time, he would simply pause and start again. Over and over, over and over, over and over.


Most of the time the other residents ignored him. Most of the time, most of them ignored everything, each lost in their own mad world. Few could speak or walk unassisted, so they would remain wherever they were placed, until someone helped them away. But on occasion an ambulatory resident would go to the piano and stare at David, or strike the keys haphazardly. One old woman, now dead, used to stand by the piano and talk at David, “Are you playing something? I don’t hear no music. You can’t play this thing.” He never responded, never acknowledged her any more than anyone else, and she would get bored and leave, usually. A few times she pushed him off the piano stool, and banged the keys madly for a short while. When that no longer held her interest she would simply walk away, and David would resume his place on the stool and start again.


Lester, in his moments of activity, would stand by the piano and shout at David, demand that he really play, call him honky and peckerwood and call down generations of African Methodist Episcopal curses on the silent blond boy’s head. At first, after the incident with the piano lid, Emma grew nervous whenever Lester noticed David, but nothing ever happened again. Lester would begin by cursing the flowers on the wallpaper, the shape of the doorknob, the grill over the radio speaker, and now and then he would turn his invectives on the others in the room, calling anyone names who caught his conscious eye, as no one did more often than David.


But mostly the other residents sat where they were placed, or paced mindlessly, or listened to the radio. It was always tuned to the NBC-Red network; whether that was from a conscious decision or simple neglect, Emma never considered. During the mornings there were local programs, farm reports and news, from Nashville and Atlanta and Chattanooga; in the afternoons, network soap operas; in the evenings, comedies, or dramas, or vaudeville programs from New York. Through them all David sat at the piano, oblivious and silent, fingering the air above the keys.


Emma arrived for work that morning and taken David to breakfast with the other patients. She had an attendant feed him while she made her rounds of the wing. An hour or so later she found him at the piano, fingering, and she stood watching him.


Mary Ann came in and saw her, and told her the news. “You know Lester died last night.”


“Oh! That’s so sad. Did he go peaceful?”


“Hah! Lester? Hell, no. Died screamin’ and cursin’ God for ever havin’ put him on this earth. One minute he was hollerin’ at the top of his lungs, sump’n ‘bout Abraham or Moses, I don’t know what. Then, bloop, he just keeled over dead. Can you come help me with his stuff?” And they went to Lester’s room to inventory and box up the few things the old man had owned.


Afterwards, saddened as always by the news of death, Emma moved slowly about the hospital. Lunch came and went, and no one spoke of Lester, and that, too, made her sad. She had helped move the residents out of the dining hall, saw David at his piano – she thought of it these days as “his” piano – checked the supplies of plates and utensils, and reviewed lists of medications for the afternoon. And now she stood in the hallway just outside the day room, scrutinizing a tray covered with little paper cups that held a rainbow of pills, hearing the music. Slow, funereal, elegant music. She found herself nodding her head in time with the slow beat as she checked the pills on her tray, and the thought, what beautiful music, floated up from her subconscious, and then she thought, consciously, but where’s it coming from?


She went to the door of the day room and pushed it halfway open. The radio speaker far to the left of the door broadcast, at low volume, the dialog of some soap opera; three middle-aged residents sat hunched in chairs in front of it. Others shuffled about in their robes and slippers, and others sat senselessly in chairs and on couches around the room. And David sat at the piano, fingering. Playing.


Emma went to the piano. David was moving his fingers, seemingly in the same pattern he had used silently for months, but this time each finger pressed a key, and his foot rose and fell on the pedal, and music, complete, full-formed, rose into the still air of the room and filled it. Mournful, slow, sad, then building, more on the black keys than the white, growing louder and fuller. Then a change, a faster pace for a brief time, lapsing back into the same theme as at the start; growing again, rising to a glorious, determined, majestic climax, ending in a flurry of low notes.

And then a pause, and he started again. His left hand pressed slowly down on two black notes an octave apart, his right began its three-note pattern. Emma moved to watch David’s face from across the instrument, put the tray down on its closed case. His eyes stayed focused on the window, but there was – did she imagine it? – there was a depth to his gaze she had never seen before. As if he saw what was out there. As if he had always seen it.


She put her hand to her throat and watched him play. He seemed, except for the eyes, exactly as always. He played his music all the way through again, then paused, and started it again. She turned and stared out the window, wondering what he saw out there.


As he came to the end of the piece the third time, she took up her tray again. She made ready to leave, and glanced at him as she stepped away. He was looking now at her.