Home

You can just picture the two of them, amid a cloud of chalk dust, each wearing a sport coat with elbow pads, squinting to see the students in the back of the lecture hall.

It's a "History 101" course, and they would begin with the following: "History says I shouldn't be here."

As strange as it may sound, both President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would seem completely at ease in a classroom. Their recent clashes reveal one of the few common attributes between them: They possess a self-awareness of their place in history -- and a penchant for using that to frame their public personas and justify their policies.

Both his supporters and opponents have used one term possibly more than any other to describe Obama's demeanor: professorial. It's a bit of a Rorschach test -- people either think it shows his grasp of policy details and an ability to explain them, or a condescending attitude toward the electorate.

Bibi falls into a similar category. When I spoke to veteran Mideast journalist and author Matt Beynon Rees in May 2009, he told me he expected Bibi had learned from his dealings with Bill Clinton, and would probably not lecture Obama on Jewish history and the Jewish connection to the state of Israel at their first meeting. He was, according to press reports, wrong.

Both Obama and Netanyahu have secured a place in the history books, and it is impossible to truly understand either without putting them in the right context.

Obama is the first black president, and Bibi is the first Israeli prime minister born in the state of Israel. And both men movingly incorporate that identity into that of their country.

In Obama's acceptance speech on Election Night, he spoke of Ann Nixon Cooper, a 106-year-old black woman. "She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky; when someone like her couldn't vote for two reasons -- because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin," he said. "And tonight, I think about all that she's seen throughout her century in America -- the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can't, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes we can."

On the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in a recorded message to European leaders, Obama said: "Few would have foreseen on that day that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg, or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it."

In his speech on race in March 2008, Obama told his story. Son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas; raised by white grandparents; lived among the rich and the poor, around the world; married to a descendent of slaves and slaveowners; etc., "and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

Netanyahu, for his part, in his speech at Bar-Ilan in June 2009, put the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in its proper historical context.

"The attacks on us began in the 1920s, became an overall attack in 1948 when the state was declared, continued in the 1950s with the fedayeen attacks, and reached their climax in 1967 on the eve of the Six-Day War, with the attempt to strangle Israel," he said. "All this happened nearly 50 years before a single Israeli soldier went into Judea and Samaria."

And Bibi made sure to go back and point out that the Jewish connection with Israel began more than 3,500 years ago.

"The right of the Jewish people to a state in the land of Israel does not arise from the series of disasters that befell the Jewish people over 2,000 years.... The right to establish our sovereign state here, in the land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish people."

Speaking before the U.N. in September, Bibi waved in his hand a copy of the minutes of a meeting held by senior Nazi officials in September 1942 bearing the specific instructions on exterminating the Jews. He then held up a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenou.

And to AIPAC in April, Bibi spoke of his father's recent 100th birthday.

"When he was born, the Czars ruled Russia, the British Empire spanned the globe, and the Ottomans ruled the Middle East," Netanyahu said. "During his lifetime, all of these empires collapsed, other powers rose and fell, and the Jewish destiny swung from despair to a new hope -- the rebirth of the Jewish state. For the first time in 2,000 years, a sovereign Jewish people could defend themselves against attack."

It's doubtful their relationship as dueling professors contributes to the friction between Bibi and Obama, but their legacies now bring them to a momentous period -- one that will shape the future in important ways, so they better learn to get along; they will now be judged by what happens on their watch. Fate has deposited them in the same classroom at a defining moment.

The rest, as they say, is history.

Seth Mandel is the managing editor of The Jewish State.