What Begin Would Have Told Obama
Shlomi Eldar considers what a meeting between former Prime Minister Menachem Begin and current US president Barack Obama would have looked like, being reminded of Begin’s meetings with President Jimmy Carter, which paved the way for a peace agreement with Egypt.
The truth is that I was very moved when President Barack Obama’s Air Force One set down on the tarmac of Ben Gurion Airport. Maybe it was because of the festive atmosphere: the IDF Band playing the national anthems of both countries; the honor guard standing at attention in fresh, crisp uniforms; and all the country’s political and military leaders standing beside the red carpet, waiting for a close-up view of the man who made history just by being elected president of the world’s greatest superpower. There he was: young, energetic, well-informed, and doing everything he could to prove that he is a true friend of Israel.
Still, his trip wasn’t all that successful until he gave his “Jerusalem Speech,” the day after his arrival [March 21]. In it, he kept giving us his solemn vow that he would guarantee the security of my country. What more did I need to get excited and to feel like I was “soaring on the wings of history,” as they say? When the presidential elections of 2008 were over, and Obama gave his victory speech in Chicago before thousands upon thousands of ecstatic Americans, even I shed a tear.
Israeli Prof. Avi Ben Zvi is an internationally acclaimed authority on American history. When I heard him on the radio, he sounded even more upbeat than me. “I am almost as excited as when late Egyptian President Answar Sadat landed in Israel (Nov. 19, 1977),” he said, and in the same context he recalled former President Jimmy Carter’s arrival in Israel (1979). This former American president who, together with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and late Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, completed the trio that signed the peace accord with Egypt.
But as Ben Zvi reminisced, Jimmy Carter also went over the heads of the country’s leaders, and more particularly the head of Menachem Begin himself, during one of the crises that preceded the signing of the accords. In his speech before the Knesset, Carter said explicitly what Obama only hinted at, and elegantly at that, during his speech at the Jerusalem Convention Center — that the people of Israel and Egypt are ready for peace, but their leaders have yet to prove that they are ready to take risks on the way to it.
