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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
David Remnick and Ryan Lizza on Obama’s speech in Jerusalem.
00:16:14
David Remnick and Ryan Lizza on Obama's speech in Jerusalem.
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- [00:00]
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- [01:14]
Dorothy Wickenden
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Friday, March 22nd. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. President Obama has been in Israel and on the west bank this week and yesterday he gave one of his trademark pull out stop speeches to the young people and started out with the story of Passover.
- [01:36]
David Remnick
It's a story of centuries of slavery and years of wandering in the desert, a story of perseverance amidst persecution and faith in God and the Torah. It's a story about finding freedom in your own land and for the Jewish people. This story is central to who you've become, but it's also a story that holds within it the universal human experience with all of its suffering, but also all of its salvation.
- [02:05]
Dorothy Wickenden
David Remnick and Ryan Lizza are here to talk with me today about Obama's visit. David okay, for such a cool customer, Obama knows how to warm up a crowd. Whatever you thought about the speech that we can agree on. And those young Israelis loved him, loved him, loved him.
- [02:20]
David Remnick
They kind of Packed the crowd. I mean, I talked to some people in Jerusalem who were at this speech, and it was young, it was liberal crowd. There were some settlers and pro settler people. There was one guy heckling about Jonathan Pollard. But in the main, it was a friendly crowd and it was a beautifully crafted speech. Maybe some years too late. Israelis really would have loved to have heard that speech at around the time of the Cairo speech in June 2009. But it's all about what comes after. If this is in isolation and it's an emotional rescue mission, that's one thing, and it's not much. If it's the first stop in a series of cajoling, pushing diplomacy, use of John Kerry and real action, then it's extremely significant.
- [03:10]
Dorothy Wickenden
Ryan, we seem to be watching sort of Obama 2008 appealing to the younger generation. You are the change, all of that. And then the Obama we've been seeing in recent weeks of 2013, bypassing the legislature, going directly to the people. Talk a little bit about the strategy there.
- [03:26]
Ryan Lizza
It looks like the history. David, tell me if you think this is wrong. The history of Obama's policy towards Israel is he got things backwards. He started off with this, we're going to be tough on the Israelis and we're going to pick a fight over the settlements that backfired and it led to basically nothing happening in the first term. Now he's come around in the second term and started perhaps looking in hindsight, where he should have started, which is as I saw. Yossi Klein Halevi in the paper today says he learned to speak Israeli. He showed us love, he showed us he understood our country. And a lot of Israeli commentators today, at least by my reading, were saying they wish he had started in that place in the beginning and then come around to nudging them on the policy.
- [04:09]
David Remnick
Which is fine, but it's leaving out one major party here, the Palestinians. The Palestinians are occupied. They've been occupied for 46 years. We're coming up on a half century by the end of the Obama administration. And I don't think the Palestinians were terribly thrilled by this triple. They're weak, they're divided. There's talk of a third intifada. I seriously doubt whether the vast majority of Palestinians were uplifted by this trip in the same way that the Israeli commentariat was. The Israeli public was. That concerns me.
- [04:40]
Ryan Lizza
And they're the ones who were told, hey, go to the bargaining table without the demand to stop the construction. Obama has given up on that demand and he's now telling the Palestinians to give up on it as well.
- [04:50]
David Remnick
But Obama did was echo the Israeli mainstream narrative by saying, I recognize how you feel. You feel that there have been peace initiatives by Rabin, by Barak, by Sharon, by Olmert that were answered by, and this is, I'm using the Israeli language that you hear every single day. They were answered by rockets, they were answered by terrorism, that were answered by rejectionism. That narrative, of course, leaves out a lot, not least an enormous settlement project that grew and grew and grew. But it was embracing. And it then gave Obama the opportunity at late in the speech to say, now you Israelis need to empathize with the Palestinians. And for that, he received applause in that friendly hall. It's not about just empathy, though. It's about politics. What troubled me about the speech was that moment that Obama always brings up, either implicitly or explicitly. One of his favorite stories is that fdr, when approached by the early civil rights leaders who wanted to push him into making certain initiatives, FDR really turned to those leaders and say, make me form a movement.
- [05:57]
Ryan Lizza
He loves that.
- [05:57]
David Remnick
He loves that because he understands that he's not the leader of a movement. He's a politician. But if he's going to abdicate on politics, if this great, great speech and series of gestures is followed by a great nothingness, then it's just wind.
- [06:14]
Dorothy Wickenden
But I want to ask both of you, what can an American president do at this point in the process, given the total chaos in the post Arab Spring world?
- [06:23]
David Remnick
That's the much harder question. And you have to lay out the complexities and difficulties. Otherwise you're just naive. And the difficulties are split. Palestinian polity, a contraption of an Israeli government that ranges from left to right to center. And it's a mess. There's no agreement on this. There's not even a hell of a lot of discussion about the Palestinian issue and the Arab Spring and the Arab winter. More to the point, Syria and Iran and Egypt and Muslim Brotherhood reignant. Even in Jordan, one thing it seemed.
- [06:58]
Ryan Lizza
Like he's trying to do is get Abu Mazen to the table by saying, hey, back off the demands on the settlements.
- [07:04]
Dorothy Wickenden
That's Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority.
- [07:08]
Ryan Lizza
Yeah, it looked like from some of the language.
- [07:10]
David Remnick
So what the demand on the Israelis is exactly?
- [07:12]
Ryan Lizza
Well, it seems like he's given up. Right. He had one demand and he's now backed away from it.
- [07:15]
Dorothy Wickenden
But don't you think, Ryan, that there must have been. Obviously there were talks between the Israeli government and the administration before he went over there, and they must have come to some kind of agreement about what this visit was going to yield.
- [07:28]
Ryan Lizza
Well, it sort of changed when he got there. We were all led to believe that he was just going as a tourist, right? That he was just going to go.
- [07:34]
David Remnick
To Israel and say they're making tiny expectations, they were setting the bar very.
- [07:38]
Ryan Lizza
Low, very low, that nothing was going to be accomplished here. And of course, he's got John Kerry along as his sidekick and Kerry's going to stay there and continue meeting. It seems to me the first step is they're trying to get the two sides to the table, to unstick the process. They're trying to get Abu Mazen to back off his demand of stopping settlement expansion. And it seems like from his language that may have been somewhat successful.
- [08:05]
David Remnick
Not sure why he should. But the settlements grow and grow and they become facts on the ground that make a two state solution more and more difficult to envisage.
- [08:13]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and in fact, David, I want to ask you because you wrote a piece before the Israeli election that was really dark. What you found when you went over there several weeks ahead of time was that the center left had pretty much fizzled and that the far right was just growing. And the Bennett, whom you spend a lot of time with, who is a settlement leader, it was scary what he had seen Israel, it was scary.
- [08:35]
David Remnick
But in the last week of the election, something awoke in the kind of Tel Aviv community, both psychically and geographically, the Tel Aviv liberal community. And they broke toward voting for a very unlikely guy named Yair Lapid, who is a kind of centrist, a former TV host and journalist, very handsome guy, kind of glamorous, and whose main issue is not the Palestinian issue, but, but a kind of secular crusade to take privileges away, and rightly so, from the ultra orthodox. So the political map in Israel is a mess. Netanyahu is weak. His cabinet is filled with completely contradictory politicians. Even in the context of Israel, you ask the absolute right question about, okay, if they can get to the table, then what? Considering everything that's there. The fact is, in that region, the alternative to negotiations and even interim agreements is despair. It's giving up entirely on a two state solution, giving up among the Palestinians and arrogantly and wrongly giving up in Israel and thinking that you can go on with the status quo and have the kind of settler mentality be the dominant politics.
- [09:46]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and Ryan, maybe that's the answer. I mean, that's what Obama is really good at and what he was going directly at in this speech, which is wake up. You know, you can't give up. Both sides have got to get going again.
- [09:58]
David Remnick
Absolutely.
- [09:58]
Ryan Lizza
Netanyahu is not strong. Right, David. I mean, coming out of this election, he's not a strong leader. And it seems that it doesn't seem like the moment is ripe for Netanyahu to suddenly be a great broker in a peace deal. Right. I mean, the results of the election don't give one much confidence that Netanyahu is suddenly going to.
- [10:15]
David Remnick
We don't know when it's ever ideal. If we look back historically, Barak was trying to make a deal as the sands were going through the hourglass on his terms. Same thing with Olmert. Olmert made his breakthrough with Abu mazen with about 5 seconds left clock and his own popularity rating at about 5% for other reasons. So it is very hard to imagine ideal conditions ever emerging in this region. And it will only get worse.
- [10:42]
Dorothy Wickenden
Let's talk a minute about Israel's security concerns, which Obama also addressed.
- [10:46]
David Remnick
So that's what I think about when Israel is faced with these challenges, that sense of an Israel that is surrounded by many in this region who still reject it and many in the world who refuse to accept it. That's why the security of the Jewish people in Israel is so important. It cannot be taken for granted. But make no mistake, those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel's right to exist, they might as well reject the earth beneath them or the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere.
- [11:20]
Dorothy Wickenden
David, Israel's overriding security concern is Iran and its program to develop nuclear weapons. What did he do, if anything, to reassure Israelis on their security anxieties?
- [11:32]
David Remnick
Well, it's not just Iran. You have Syria.
- [11:34]
Dorothy Wickenden
Syria. He mentioned Syria as well.
- [11:35]
David Remnick
7,000 dead five minutes away. You have the Jordanian king in a precarious situation. You have the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which has shown its true ideological colors in the previous statements of Mr. Morsi. Iran is just one component in a really bad, worrying neighborhood. Neighborhood, as they constantly say. What did Obama do? He showed his empathy. He showed that he understood this and he asserted America's partnership and support and said, you are not alone. And that was the thing that had people rising out of their seats left, right and center in Israel.
- [12:13]
Dorothy Wickenden
Well, and Ryan, you've written about the administration's foreign policy certainly in the first term. What do you see? Is there any change in the way that he is addressing issues in the Middle East?
- [12:23]
Ryan Lizza
So far he's moved closer to the Netanyahu's view on Iran. Right. And he said very clearly again while he was in Israel that The US Policy is not containment. I mean, he's been very clear about that, because I think people think secretly, oh, Obama says all this stuff about, oh, sure, we would go to war to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon, but he doesn't really mean it. In reality, America will deal with a nuclear weapon in Iran and will just move to containment. That Obama has some sort of secret containment strategy. And Obama said, no, I don't. If negotiations and sanctions fail, he doesn't say, we'll go to war. But that's the implication here. Right? And that's the position that Netanyahu wanted him to stake out all along.
- [13:04]
David Remnick
And the Israelis didn't believe it. I mean, they didn't believe it because there's the example of North Korea, which may not be an exact replica of this.
- [13:11]
Dorothy Wickenden
And what about Syria? He did talk about Syria, and there's been a lot of questions raised about what, if anything, Obama should do. And the administration has shown some reluctance all along to get involved.
- [13:22]
Ryan Lizza
And they were divided on this. You know, the big debate while he was there was whether there was a chemical attack in Syria, which Obama has. I don't know if he's backed himself into a corner, but he has said that that would be a, quote, game changer. He hasn't really defined what that means. But everyone assumes it means some kind of intervention, Right? And at that press conference, you could see it in Obama's face. He wanted to be very careful about triggering this red line that he set up. And the Israelis say, yeah, the Syrians were using chemical weapons.
- [13:51]
David Remnick
The Americans say, no, I think this week we're celebrating, if that's the word for it, or commemorating the 10th annivers or the invasion of Iraq, which was a terrible mistake. And anybody like me who even mildly supported it was wrong. And wrong to support Bush, even implicitly wrong to even believe moral avatars like Voxlav Havel or Adam Miknick, who supported just wrong. But the extent of the disaster includes a really alarmed, wary view of American power. So that the tragedy in a place like Syria goes on now to the point where 70,000 people are dead. And our national psychology is such that we are including, very much including the president, extremely wary of getting involved, maybe rightly so. I mean, look, Syria is so complicated, and who you would support and how militarily is so vexed. But we cannot deny that that experience in Iraq, that misbegotten adventure, which began with horrible deception at the top of the American government, has influenced events and.
- [14:58]
Ryan Lizza
Foreign policy since it completely discredited Liberal humanitarian interventionism.
- [15:04]
David Remnick
Now, I have to say on that same point, not all the same people who were right about Iraq were right about Rwanda or Bosnia or Kosovo. I don't know that there are many people that I know or read that were right about everything, because a lot of this is dependent on the success of a mission or imagining what might have happened had there been one. But to witness 70,000 people and counting and counting and counting in Syria and to see the inability of the west to formulate an effective policy in any which way is beyond maddening.
- [15:40]
Dorothy Wickenden
All right, so just to end on a possibly slightly more hopeful note, then, let's switch regions. Yes, exactly. Did the President accomplish anything on this.
- [15:50]
David Remnick
Trip at the cost of sounding like one of those news reports that always ends, but no one knows for sure? It depends on the follow through. If this is followed through by serious diplomacy led by John Kerry, who's really knowledgeable about this region and very serious about it, and if the administration becomes more and more involved in a positive way of getting these two parties, which are seemingly so weak and so fractured, to make progress, then, yes, this is a real, in a sense, emotional and diplomatic curtain raiser. If it just stops here, then no.
- [16:24]
Ryan Lizza
Ryan, yeah, maybe he's laid the groundwork with the Israeli public and maybe beyond the public to listen to him and trust him a little bit more the next time he asks someone like Netanyahu to do something hard.
- [16:36]
David Remnick
The question Obama's always asking of any visitors to him about the Middle east or anybody from the region is, who is my constituency in Israel or in Palestine or in both. And I think what this trip was about was increasing the breadth and depth of his constituency, at least in Israel. I don't know that he succeeded in Palestine.
- [16:56]
Dorothy Wickenden
Okay, thank you both. David Remnick is the editor of the New Yorker, and Ryan Lissa is the magazine's Washington correspondent. This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Dorothy Wickenden.
- [17:07]
Ryan Lizza
You can subscribe to this and other free New Yorker podcasts in the itunes store. The weekly audio edition of the magazine is available at audible.com subscribers can read.
- [17:16]
David Remnick
The magazine online@newyorker.com and also in the tablet edition on the iPad and the Kindle Fire.
- [17:30]
Katie Drummond
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [17:32]
David Remnick
I'm Michael Colori, Wired's director of consumer Tech and culture.
- [17:36]
Dorothy Wickenden
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.
- [17:39]
Katie Drummond
And our show Uncanny Valley is all.
- [17:42]
Dorothy Wickenden
About the people, power and influence of.
- [17:44]
Katie Drummond
Silicon Valley at Wired. We're constantly, constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
- [17:55]
David Remnick
Right? So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
- [18:06]
Katie Drummond
Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [18:17]
Ryan Lizza
From prx.