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Will Obama Finally Crack the Israeli Code?

(Bloomberg) Jeffrey Goldberg - One of the reasons Obama is traveling to Israel is to correct the impression, partly created in his 2009 Cairo speech, that he doesn't understand Israel's history, and has no feeling for the underlying justice of its cause. The Cairo speech had a chilling effect because, to Israelis, the Holocaust alone doesn't justify the existence of their state. "The Holocaust doesn't explain why we're here," said Yossi Klein Halevi, a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. "The Holocaust explains why we fight as fiercely as we do to stay here, but it doesn't explain our rootedness." Halevi said Obama failed to acknowledge "Jewish indigenousness in the region," the idea that the uninterrupted Jewish presence in the lands of ancient Israel for more than 3,000 years justifies the modern Jewish claim to a state there. In his first term, the president thought that he shouldn't travel to Israel or the Palestinian territories until a negotiating process was well underway. But his thinking shifted last year, when he realized that reintroducing himself to Israelis, and conveying to them that he understood their situation, could serve to build trust and create more space for an American-guided peace process.
2013-03-18 00:00:00
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