Change is in the air. Everybody has the right to vote for it. Nobody has the right to shoot it down.
By LIAT COLLINSobama smiles 224.88(photo credit: AP)
Many years ago - so long that the letters PC did not stand for either "personal computer" or "politically correct," neither of which had been invented yet - I had a high-school teacher full of ideals and enthusiasm she wanted to impart to my impressionable class. The teacher, one of the few Indian members of staff at that time, asked the roomful of teenage girls to describe what an American looks like.
To our credit, I don't remember anyone coming up with the stereotype of an an overweight, loud tourist armed with a camera. But another stereotype we did - wholesale. Each of us drew some version of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl. The teacher looked at the results and then asked: "Why didn't you draw a black girl? There are plenty of Americans who are black."
I don't remember the name of the teacher but the exercise in its way must be considered a success. The results have stayed in my mind throughout the intervening decades. They resurfaced from the depths of my consciousness and conscience during the US presidential race where so much attention was focused on Barack Obama's color.
Obama and I are the same age. My school had many black, Indian and Pakistani students. "Race" was something you did in sports lessons. I don't remember color being much of an issue. But that's because we had never been exposed to segregation or the concept of busing.
Obama's election definitely marks a change in the world order. Although it is perhaps a culmination of a process. Some of the credit, indeed, could even go to George W. Bush, who appointed as secretary of state first Colin Powell and then Condoleezza Rice, setting the precedent that African Americans could hold the country's top positions based on talent, not color. And that, in my mind, makes a lot more sense than affirmative action, which calls into doubt the skills of an appointee by stressing ethnicity or gender. Perhaps that's something else that we subconsciously learned in our all-girls school: neither color nor sex should be an obstacle.
But since it was not always like that, it was hard not to get excited by the US presidential elections. Even my seven-year-old son, aware that something important was taking place, begged to watch Obama's acceptance speech as it was broadcast on television while he was getting ready for school on an ordinary Israeli morning. And then, suddenly sounding uncannily like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, my child called out to me: "Mum, I don't think this is America anymore."
It wasn't a political reflection on the dramatic change of leadership: Israel Television had switched coverage in the middle of the fanfare in the US to report on the operation in Gaza, uncovering a terrorists' tunnel. Boom. Images of dead Hamas gunmen, wounded IDF soldiers and incoming missiles had suddenly replaced the jubilation in the more-than-ever-United States. We weren't in Kansas - or rather Chicago - anymore. We were back in our reality where the question is not the color of Obama's skin but his unknown future policies in the Middle East.
November 4, 2008, will be remembered for Obama's election. The date November 4 has a very different connotation in Israel: the day that former prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995.
There is no doubt that it is better to change a leader as part of a democratic process than to watch democracy bleed as a leader is slain by a fanatic who doesn't agree with his policies.
MUCH HAS changed in the intervening 13 years. There was even a report last week in the mass-circulation Hebrew-language daily Yediot Aharonot that Yuval Rabin, the son of the slain premier, might support Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. This in the week in which former MK and minister Benny Begin officially rejoined the Likud, which his father had once led in a social revolution not much less dramatic in Israeli terms than Obama's election, and which Begin Jr. had left a decade ago to protest Netanyahu's Hebron agreement with the Palestinians.
Underlying all the local changes is a feeling that things cannot go on much longer as they have: there is a tectonic-like movement as old-new Likud names like Begin's and Dan Meridor's pop up on the political scene; former Meretz leader and Oslo architect Yossi Beilin retires from politics; and the National Religious Party disbands in favor of a yet-to-be-named list focusing on a broader potential electorate and social issues such as education.
Israel is going to the polls in February to elect a new prime minister. In January, the term of Mahmoud Abbas as head of the Palestinian Authority comes to an end. Obama is about to take over as head of the US, the only world super-power. The new leaders are unlikely to have what in Hebrew is known as "mea yemei hessed," a hundred days of grace - a period in which to decide what is the best course of action, free from outside influences and dramas.
The dilemmas facing the leaders in this region alone are formidable: a nearly nuclear Iran; deadly confusion and disorder in Iraq; a situation close to civil war in the Palestinian territories; a rapidly rearming Hizbullah in Lebanon, courtesy of Syria and Iran; and the specter of al-Qaida terror everywhere. All this at a time when the world economy is teetering on the verge of collapse - a situation which has, in the past, led to war.
We have here change without much time for transition. And the unknown factors are greater than the known. My generation in Britain was raised on the great TV comedy series of Monty Python's Flying Circus, giving us a collective outlet of irony and humo(u)r often lost in translation into American English, and Yes, Minister and its sequel Yes, Prime Minister.
Together they gave me a sense of the absurd and the realization that it doesn't much matter who you elect: what counts is who the country's leader appoints as his advisors.
What is more - such are the wonders of democracy - the ultimate power is in the hands of Congress, parliament or whatever you happen to call it. That is why it is so important to see who Obama chooses to serve him in the US and who is joining what Knesset list over here.
Israel will remember Yitzhak Rabin on the Hebrew anniversary of his death today, and tomorrow hold municipal elections - while gearing up for the national polls.
Change is in the air. Everybody has the right to vote for it. Nobody has the right to shoot it down. The ultimate sign of political maturity is the realization that you can bring about a new world without destroying the old one.
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