Obama's Corrosive Golden Mean

Peter Wehner is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. He served in the Bush White House as director of the office of strategic initiatives.

From his:

The Not So Golden Mean

The best way to view President Obama's speech in Cairo is to understand the way Obama views himself and the rhetorical devices he employs. In this case, the key to unlocking Obama's speech may be Aristotle's golden mean, the search for a mid-point between extremes. Obama's rhetorical template is an increasingly familiar one: he gives voice to one side of a dispute and then the other. And Obama -- our philosopher-king, the Voice of Reason in an unreasonable world -- interprets and arbitrates these disputes, putting them in just the right context and arriving at just the right solution. Or so we are led to believe. The trouble is that Obama's approach at times distorts history and mistreats our closest allies.

...Obama's fourth "golden mean" deals with Israel and the Palestinians. In this section, Israel is portrayed as home to a historically persecuted people. Threatening Israel with destruction 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." At the same time, "it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people -- Muslims and Christians -- have suffered in pursuit of a homeland." 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." The result is a "stalemate"; both sides have "legitimate aspirations" but also suffer from "a painful history that makes compromise elusive." We cannot see this conflict "only from one side or the other" because that will "be blind to the truth." And it is time to act on what everyone knows to be true: Israel will not go away and the Palestinians need a state. To that end, Palestinians must abandon violence. "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed," Obama said. "It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus," he went on.

Israelis, on the other hand, 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.

Among the problems with Obama's speech is that in order to make his narrative fit, he must manipulate history, sometimes subtly and sometimes not, sometimes by what he omits and sometimes by what he states...

...Then there is the issue of Israel and the Palestinians. What is troubling about Obama's account is the moral equivalence he asserts between Israel and the Palestinians is false. It also ignores what Israel is: democratic and lawful, willing to grant rights to its Arab citizens, willing to hold itself accountable for its mistakes, a country of bustling energy, entrepreneurial spirit, and a thriving civil society. Israel is among the most admirable and impressive nations in the world, and that we have ever seen. And all of this despite living in a region that for the most part despises her and in some instances wants to destroy her.

Beyond that, Obama perpetuates falsehoods, including the one that Israelis deny the Palestinian right to exist just as Palestinians deny Israel's right to exist. That is true only in rare cases, and in any event it fails to take into account Israel's many good-faith efforts to give the Palestinians a homeland, including in 2000, when Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered almost all of the territories the Palestinians had asked for. Yasir Arafat rejected the offer and began a second intifada. And in Gaza in 2005 Israel did what no other nation -- not the Jordanians, not the British, not anyone -- has ever done before: provide the Palestinians with the opportunity for self-rule. In response, Israel was shelled by thousands of rockets and mortar attacks. Hamas used Gaza as its launching point. Yet it is Israel , according to Obama, that must make yet more concessions and give up yet more land, as if stopping settlements will fundamentally transform Palestinian attitudes. It will not. The sine qua non for progress is for the Palestinian leadership to make its own inner peace with the Jewish state. If it did, as Jordan has, a Palestinian homeland would surely follow; and if it does not, peace is impossible. Israel has already shown it can make peace with Arab countries and give up huge swaths of land (like the Sinai Desert) if only those nations reconcile themselves to the existence of Israel and cast aside their violent animus toward her.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and tragic and needs to end. But the source of that suffering lies with a corrupt leadership and the complicity of other Arab nations. To cast all the blame on Israel is deeply unfair...