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Gershom Gorenberg writes:
Sometime in the weeks ahead, Jerusalem will receive the latest in a long line of American political pilgrims -- Barack Obama. Obama's entire overseas swing will be a tightrope act -- necessary, but unforgiving of a single stumble. Nowhere will the contradictory purposes of the trip be more constricting than in Israel. The visit he should actually make to prepare for the presidency is impossible. But it's worth imagining, if only as a yardstick to measure what politics allows him to do.By the strange rules of the current campaign, the candidate who got it right on Iraq must defend his understanding of the world against the one who got it wrong. So in Europe and the Middle East Obama will meet national leaders. He'll seek to inspire enthusiastic comments from them, demonstrating he can improve relations frazzled by George W. Bush. At press conferences, he'll need to speak professorially -- showing he arrived knowledgeable and quickly gained new insights. An Obama gaffe will echo for much longer than John McCain's bizarre remark in Amman in March that Shi'ite Iran was supporting the Sunni al-Qaeda.Gorenberg goes on to describe the type of visit Obama will take, one in which "protocol forces a visiting political figure to spend his time with top officials, providing a terribly restrictive view of a country." And he describes the type of visit Obama needs to take, which "consists of the inexpedient, the unlikely and the impossible." The inexpedient is the meeting Obama should have with Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayad to try and understand the negotiation position and practical concerns of the Palestinian Authority. The unlikely is a visit to the settlements. "Driving 15 kilometers from the Green Line to reach Ariel," Gorenberg says, "would provide a visceral sense of how annexing the settlement to Israel would slice a Palestinian state in two." And then there's the sadly impossible: Going to an East Jerusalem cafe and chatting, incognito, with Jews and Arabs alike.
