Three days after President Obama’s address to the Arab and Muslim world, voters in Lebanon went to the polls to elect a new parliament. According to the Times, “most analysts” had confidently predicted victory for the electoral coalition led by Hezbollah—the Party of God, which is aligned with Syria and Iran, and has been responsible for most of the violence on Israel’s northern border. Most analysts, it turns out, were wrong. The moderate coalition, routinely described as pro-American and pro-Western, took seventy-one seats to just fifty-seven for Hezbollah and its allies.

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The politics of Lebanon, a scalding soup of ethnic groupings, some of them armed and dangerous, make Chicago’s look like Montpelier’s. The words of an American President, even one from Chicago, were not necessarily foremost in the minds of the Shiites, Sunnis, Druze, and Christians of many theological varieties and political persuasions who lined up to cast their ballots and dip their thumbs in ink. But most analysts (they’re indefatigable) agreed that Obama’s speech, and the carefully constructed edifice of public diplomacy of which it was the keystone, was a factor in the outcome.

Meanwhile, as this was being written, a joyfully energized electorate was awaiting the results of a vigorously contested election for President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. No matter who wins—the jingoist-populist-obscurantist incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or his comparatively moderate main opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi—ultimate power will continue to rest with the “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his council of unaccountable theocrats, who kept liberal challengers off the ballot. But Iran is not a completely closed society. Change is in the Tehran air, and the American President’s openness is part of it.

In Cairo, Obama spoke for a little more than fifty minutes, the length of a university lecture or a psychoanalytic session. His speech had elements of both, and he offered his audience not only ordered information, argument, and context but also the catharsis of saying aloud things long unsaid. He wished, he said, to speak clearly and plainly, and that is what he did. When he lamented that the fear and the anger provoked by the “enormous trauma” of 9/11 had “led us to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals,” he called our most shameful act by its name, torture. When he reviewed the dismal history of our relations with Iran, he said, “In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government”—an apparently unprecedented Presidential acknowledgment. He called Israel’s presence in the West Bank and Gaza an occupation, and he called the situation intolerable. He called Palestine Palestine. These are things that Muslim audiences are unused to hearing from an American President. By the same token, he called anti-Semitism vile; he called denial of the Holocaust ignorant and hateful; from the heart of the Arab world, he called for democracy and women’s rights; from an Egyptian lectern, he called for tolerance of Coptic Christians. These are things that, too often, Muslim audiences are unused to hearing at all.

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The Cairo address had the qualities we have come to expect from Obama’s best speeches: empathy, frankness, respect for his listeners’ intelligence. This time, he had an inherited advantage. Many of the words and phrases he used would have sounded strained and pandering coming from any other Western leader, ever. But Barack Hussein Obama’s personal history drained the condescension from his recitation of the contributions of Islam to world civilization and of Muslims to American life. He sprinkled markers of respect: Islam was “revealed”; a mention of Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad was followed, as in Islamic custom, by “peace be upon them”; the Koran was “the Holy Koran,” as holy as the Holy Bible.

There were moments of excess and errors of omission. A boast that “the United States government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab, and to punish those who would deny it” was a clause too far: the secular French Republic has its sacred traditions, too, and one of them forbids the display of religious accessories in state schools. A mention of the eight hundred thousand Jewish refugees from Arab lands might have been in order. And the Jews’ tie to the land, if not to the state, of Israel goes back further than the Holocaust.

But Obama was seeking to create a new mood, which is a prerequisite to progress. He did not speak of “terrorism” or “the peace process.” Instead, he said this to one side:

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. . . . It is a sign neither of courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children or to blow up old women on a bus. And this to the other:

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.

For admonishing Palestinians with the experience of African-Americans, Obama got no thanks from American neoconservatives, who deployed a favorite trope, “moral equivalence,” to attack the comparison. But, if it is an exaggeration to equate Palestinian suffering with the sufferings of American blacks under the two and a half centuries of chattel slavery (which was not abolished without violence), comparing it with the century of segregation and disenfranchisement that followed is both useful and fair.

It has long been the official American view that Israel’s settlements on the West Bank should, at a minimum, stop expanding. Under George W. Bush, “settlement activity” was criticized, if that’s the word, as “not helpful,” a formula perfectly consistent with “not harmful.” But Obama appears to be serious. Settlement growth—which has been the dynamic status quo under Israeli governments of all stripes, and which the present right-wing ruling coalition appears wedded to—is indeed harmful. It is harmful to any prospect of peace, harmful to the economies of both sides, harmful to Israel’s Jewish and democratic character, and helpful only to the fanatics on both sides who hold the majority hostage.

“It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true,” Obama said in Cairo. And what everyone knows to be true, admittedly or not, is that the only solution offering a modicum of peace and justice for the peoples of Israel and Palestine is a state for each; that neither is capable of finding its way to that solution on its own; and that only American firmness and perseverance can save them both. The path ahead is littered with hazards, not least a fratricidal Palestinian leadership, divided between weakness and intransigence, and an Israeli government practiced in the ways of Washington and dominated by politicians hostile to the very idea of Palestinian statehood. The President’s words in Cairo were inspiring and indispensable. Whether, years from now, they will be remembered with pride or with pity, with admiration or with mockery, is something that no one, not even most analysts, can say. ♦