President Barack Obama believes that peace is “possible” and his administration
is “going to work very hard to advance that process,” US Secretary of State John
Kerry told The Jerusalem Post on Friday.
Speaking ahead of Obama’s speech
at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Kerry said he hoped the
president’s visit would advance the peace process, although it was ultimately
“up to the people of Israel and the Palestinians.”
“The president
believes every word he said yesterday,” Kerry added, referring to Obama’s speech
to university students at the Jerusalem International Convention Center on
Thursday evening.
Kerry said that Friday’s ceremony – in which Obama lit
a flame in memory of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust – was “very
moving and very touching,” and that it was “overwhelming in many ways to touch
such an extraordinary, tragic history.”
However, he continued, the
president was also “celebrating” what the secretary of state called “an
extraordinary rebirth and resurgence.”
“I think it’s one of history’s
great stories,” Kerry told the Post.
During his speech at Yad Vashem,
Obama stressed the historic ties of the Jewish people to the land, saying that
“here on your ancient land let it be said for all the world to hear, the State
of Israel does not exist because of the Holocaust, but with the survival of a
strong Jewish State of Israel such a Holocaust will never happen
again.”
Speaking to the Post at Yad Vashem, Israeli Ambassador to the US
Michael Oren said he found Obama’s message to be of great
significance.
“In the Arab world in general we face two denials that are
flip-sides of the same coin,” Oren said: “Holocaust denial” and “Jewish people
denial.”
“This whole visit has been about refuting that denial, whether
it be by coming to Yad Vashem and upholding the memory of the Holocaust or by
going to the Shrine of the Book and reaffirming the Jewish people’s
millennia-long connection to the Land of Israel,” he said.
Obama came to
Israel at “one of the most challenging periods of Israel’s history,” Oren said,
and “the fact that leader of the most powerful nation on earth comes here and
gives a message of unequivocal support and respect and affection is a message
that is not only crucial for us to hear, but it’s vital that the people in the
Middle East hear it.”
Speaking about the Palestinians, Oren said that
while Israel recognizes them “as a people endowed with the right of
self-determination, they do not recognize the Jewish people as a people with the
same rights.”
This “asymmetry,” he said, “is one of the reasons that some
of the messages that the president’s been conveying here are so
important.
The message here is all about Jewish people-hood. He said it
again and again in his speech and he talked about legitimate rights. He talked
about the Jewish right of self-determination.
“That is the meaning of the
trip for me.”
The US president’s message to Palestinian Authority
President Mahmoud Abbas was clear, Oren said.
“You have to accept the
Holocaust, you have to acknowledge it [and] you have to accept the Jewish people
and their unassailable right to self-determination in their ancestral
homeland.”
That acceptance, he asserted, was “integral” to being a
partner for peace.