He got his award today, and to make matters worse, lots of love from the people of Israel and
HaaretzFor Barack Obama to come to Jerusalem, and speak to Israeli students and talk persuasively of the possibility of a secure and peaceful future, for him to do that and garner a roaring ovation of approval, he would have to have given one hell of a speech.
He did.
This was the speech that these young Israelis not only needed but wanted to hear. A speech that radically redefined centrism in Israel, bringing it down to extraordinary common denominators in directions Israelis have learned to think of as diametrically opposed.
He spoke of security and peace as inextricably and necessarily linked, not a narrow choice between options, but a conscious choice for both.
They roared.
This was not the student crowd that Obama is used to. These students are Israelis. This is a crowd that is world-weary, hair-trigger volatile. They have come by it honestly. In comparison to their American counterparts, they are, by and large, older by several years – some would say, several lifetimes. They enter college after years in the military, often followed by the escape-valve rehab of a marathon trek to remote continents.
They know a snow job when they hear it. And the rare times when someone makes a sincere and enormous effort to understand them, to see things from their point of view, and to bring them a message that no leader in Israel has managed to bring them, they know that too. And if they respond with a huge reservoir of unaddressed, pent up emotional energy, as they did Thursday evening, even that fusty hall in Jerusalem - that house that boredom built, that home to bureaucratic Jewish organizational conferences dull as death - can erupt with the electricity and positive might that are the hallmarks if something we thought we'd all lost long ago: hope.
