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Needed: An Affirmation of Israel's Historical Right to Exist

[Wall Street Journal] Judea Pearl - In theory, Mr. Obama's speech in Cairo affirmed everything Israelis have ever hoped for. Peaceful coexistence and mutual acceptance with its Arab neighbors has been the ultimate dream of the Zionist movement since the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The peace offers that Ehud Barak made to Yasser Arafat in 2000 and that Ehud Olmert made to Mahmoud Abbas in 2009 prove that the idea of a two-state utopia is still firmly lodged in the psyche of most Israelis. Palestinians view Israeli settlement construction as the litmus test for Israel's intentions vis-a-vis a future Palestinian state. Israelis view Palestinian textbooks, TV programs and mosque sermons to be the litmus test of Palestinian intentions. A society that teaches its youngsters to negate its neighbor's legitimacy, so the argument goes, cannot be serious about respecting a peace accord as permanent. Mr. Obama's speech had crisp and stern words to say about Israeli settlements, but hardly a word about Palestinian denial and incitement. The president said, "It is time for these settlements to stop." But the hoped-for reciprocal sentence - "It is time for Palestinian incitement to stop" - was conspicuously absent. In Israel, even the harshest opponent of the settlement movement would not support the emergence of a sovereign neighbor, rocket range away, that is unwilling to invest in education for a lasting peace. Secondly, Mr. Obama's rationale for Israel's legitimacy began with the Holocaust, not with the birthplace of Jewish history. "The aspiration for a Jewish homeland," he said, "is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied." Who else defines Israel's legitimacy that way? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does. Iran sees Israel as a foreign entity to the region, hastily created to sooth European guilt over the Holocaust. Israelis consider this distortion of history to be an assault on the core of their identity as a nation. An affirmation of "Israel's historical right to exist," based on a 2,000-year continuous quest to rebuild a national homeland, is what the region needs to hear from Mr. Obama. The magic words "historical right" have the capacity to change the entire equation in the Middle East. They convey a genuine commitment to permanence, and can therefore invigorate the peace process with the openness and goodwill that it has been lacking thus far. The writer, a professor of computer science at UCLA, is president of the Daniel Pearl Foundation.
2009-06-12 06:00:00
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