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A worthy agenda
By Haaretz Editorial
Tags: Barack Obama, Muslim World 

In his speech next week directed at the Muslim and Arab world, U.S. President Barack Obama is expected to launch a new era in America's relations with Islam. The speech in Cairo will be about stretching out a conciliatory hand to some 1.5 billion Muslims, who in the past eight years have seen the United States as a military and cultural invader bent on changing the region's character in line with American dictates. This is a new vision in which Obama's U.S. will try to stop dictating values, democracy or cultural foundations and choose to see the Muslims and Arabs as equal partners with interests similar to America's.

The White House spokesman hastened to deny the president's intention to outline a comprehensive Middle East peace plan in Cairo, but we can't ignore the close link between the vision and policy this vision is to yield. The U.S. is striving, not only with the president's speech, to restore its political legitimacy in the Middle East. This legitimacy has badly eroded both because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as America's special relations with Israel. Due to the wars and the United States' tendency to support Israel's positions absolutely, the U.S. has lost its status as an honest broker and a power that can and wants to impartially examine the needs of Israel, the Palestinians and the Arabs.

Israel is used to zero-sum games in which every American leaning toward the Arabs does so at Israel's expense, and every expression in Israel's favor is an achievement at the Arabs' expense. So it awaits the speech suspiciously, not to say apprehensively. So far Israel has "benefited" from the balance in which Muslim hostility toward the U.S. has turned Israel into America's only apparent strategic partner in the region. Now Washington may find new friends. Israel's exclusivity is about to crack, if not crash.
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But Israel should calm down. Instead of fearing the reestablishment of the U.S.'s status in the Middle East, Israel should encourage it and aspire to strengthen American influence in this part of the world. A U.S. that can strongly move the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians, that can forge common interests between Israel and Arab regimes struggling against local terror, that would set up a regional alliance and act to block strategic threats like the Iranian one, is a U.S. whose new agenda is worthy both for Israel and the Arab and Muslim countries.

This is not a vision Israel should be pressured to adhere to for fear for its relations with Washington, but a vision it should adopt with all its heart as tidings of hope. An American-Arab and Muslim friendship could prove to be a strategic asset. Washington is now expected, as a continuation to Obama's speech in Cairo and his meeting with Saudi King Abdullah, to present a viable peace plan that would launch the practical stage of the American vision.
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