Virtually all my Israeli friends, young and old, smart and smarter, have been willing to bet me that Americans are “not ready for a black president.”I don't spend my days looking for such examples, but there certainly seem to be a lot of them out there. In the past couple of weeks, American commentators have written about this reaction in Europe, Egypt, now Israel, and I've certainly seen it a lot here in Mexico. In my experience, the questioners usually have a simplistic view of race in America, or they are just repeating something they heard, or are expressing some racism of their own. Whatever the cause, it's annoying, and I want it to stop, immediately. Do you hear me, 5.7 billion non-Americans? I want it to stop now!
Avishai points to an ulterior motive behind Israeli skepticism of the Illinois Senator:
In the back of their minds they fear that two generations of special pleading—about how Israel’s occupation should be rationalized as the Jews’ special need to (how does Prof. Yehezkel Dror put it?) “subordinate morality to survival”—may not quite work on Obama, much the way it did not work on Kissinger. Obama has heard Jabotinsky-like apologetics for victim exceptionalism from the Sharptons—indeed, from the Wrights—for two generations. It takes one to know one. The most frightening question is this: if democracy makes a black man a mainstream American, can it also make an Arab a mainstream Israeli?
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