The Blog and the Shower

How the president uses language matters; it shapes the way the media and the way both his supporters and detractors use it as well.  That’s one reason I was glad to have a president who’s dropped the us-against-them spiel and who employs a higher level of discourse, even if he doesn’t always follow through with concrete actions.

Today, my mother brought my attention to a good example of the way that Obama’s speech is being used to frame the political debate in America, with both positive and negative consequences.  She called to recommend that I turn on our local public radio station to listen to a debate between Portlanders at Pioneer Courthouse Square on Israel and Palestine, and when I did, I found that the precise issue under debate was whether or not Obama was fair in asking Israelis to halt the expansion of the settlements, using this part of Obama’s speech as a jumping-off point:

At the same time, Israelis 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.

This is a great example of the disconnect between the debate within America and in the Arab world, which Obama’s speech mostly failed to bridge.  Although I hate to speak for other people, I think it’s already self-evident to most Arabs that the Israeli settlements need to stop; furthermore, it is also already clear that the existing settlements need to be removed.  For the radio debate moderator, however, the question of the removal of existing settlements was a secondary one that he only brought up later on.  If Obama had called for the removal of these settlements, however, he could have encouraged the political debate to bypass the far less pertinent question of a halt and cut straight to this more key issue (which is not, by the way, even a subject of debate in the Arab world that I’ve ever seen).

There’s quite a contradtion in the quotation above, in which Obama calls for the creation of a Palestinian state, but not necessarily the removal of settlements, in the same breath.  I’m not sure how there could possibly be a Palestinian state with the Israeli settlements fragmenting the West Bank as they do.  The best (or at least most visually interesting) representation of this is the widely-circulated image called “L’archipel de Palestine orientale,” which I saw on the wonderful blog Strange Maps, that skillfully conveys the way that Israeli settlements and the Oslo zoning process (which dictated which pieces of the West Bank would be under Israeli and PA control) have reduced the West Bank to a series of “islands,” the sum of which don’t equal a single, governable state.  One could logically be against the creation of a Palestinian state and also against the removal of settlements, but not for the former and against the latter, and this is the more important question that should have been brought up for debate.

To be fair, of course, Obama didn’t say he was against the removal of settlements; he just didn’t call for it.  It remains to be seen whether he’ll find the political courage to do so.