Why President Obama Should Not Visit the Western Wall

[cbayer]

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/6943/why_president_obama_should_not_visit_the_western_wall_/

March 19, 2013
Why President Obama Should Not Visit the Western Wall
By MELISSA WEININGER
Melissa Weininger is a scholar of modern Jewish Studies. She received her Ph.D. in 2010, and has taught at The University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Rice University.



Lesley Sachs of Women of the Wall is arrested while praying, October of 2012


Last week the New York Times and the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that President Obama will not go to the Western Wall when he visits Israel next week.

An official who spoke to the Times framed this lacuna in the president’s itinerary as a security issue, explaining that the difficulty of protecting the president near the site was too great. And other presidents, including Bill Clinton in 1996, have not visited the Wall either. In general there has been little response, positive or negative, to the news that the president would not go to the Wall. But Americans and Israelis concerned with civil rights in Israel should be applauding the news, because there are many good reasons why President Obama should not visit the Western Wall.

The New York Times quoted Israeli ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren as saying, “Everything on the Seder table—from the lamb shank to the parsley to the egg—is rife with symbolism. So, too, with every item on the president’s itinerary.”

This is a timely comparison—Passover is just around the corner. But importantly, Passover is a holiday that celebrates freedom and recalls the exodus from Egypt as a moral parable, admonishing us to treat the stranger in our midst with respect—while the Wall, especially in the last year, has become a symbol of the opposite, the impediment to civil and human rights created by the Israeli civil government’s entanglement with official state religion.

more at link