Today Benjamin Netanyahu, as you probably have heard, will address a joint session of Congress. Whatever he says, the speech will probably be in the running for one of the worst speeches ever given in Washington. There is a lot of competition. But tomorrow, March 4th is the 150th anniversary of what was probably the greatest speech ever given in the city, President Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. It is a speech that all heads of government, perhaps especially Israeli prime ministers, ought to study carefully.

The speech was given at the end of what remains the bloodiest war in American history, with some 700,000 persons killed during the four years of struggle. It had not been easy, and though Lincoln and the Union forces were on the verge of victory everyone knew the horrible costs. “Neither party,” Lincoln said “expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained.”

One of Lincoln’s main points is that both sides were convinced of the justness of their cause, and that God was supporting their side. They both demanded more of their religion that it could possibly deliver. “Both sides read the same Bible, and pray to the same God, and each invokes his aid against the other. . . the prayer of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes.”

This did not lead Lincoln to a plague on both your houses type skepticism. Lincoln had no doubt of the justness of the Union’s cause, which was the elimination and abolition of slavery. This had not been Lincoln’s cause four years earlier. While, as he stated in 1865, everyone on both sides knew from the outset that slavery “was, somehow the cause of the war” many shied away from this obvious truth, and tried to argue, as Lincoln did in his first inaugural, that the main reason for fighting the war was keeping the nation intact. As Lincoln explained in 1865, the prolonged and sanguinary nature of the war altered its aims and objectives. Lincoln hoped the scourge of war would soon be ended, but if necessary, he would not stop fighting, “If God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two-hundred years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.”

The peace had to be just, but for the peace to last, it also had to be fair, and as generous as possible to all of the many sides and participants in the struggle. The peace had to be, in the address’s famous concluding words, a peace “with malice towards none, with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us . . . bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and for his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Lincoln’s address is a model on how to try to end a war. Of course there are vast differences between America in 1865 and the current situation between Israel and Palestine. But there are many lessons, too. Lincoln was fervent in his belief that his cause and his war had been just, but he acknowledged that in any war there are many “narratives” to use the current phrase, and that one’s commitment to one truth does not mean that others will not cling just as fiercely to theirs. The resolution is not necessarily a compromise, or a 50/50 split, but “charity” to all parties, or perhaps in other words, fairness. Listen to your opponents without demonizing them. Use religion as a way of remembering God is not fully on anyone’s side, and not for anathemizing enemies. Try to craft inclusive and not punitive solutions to outstanding problems.
T
here are many just causes that animate Israel and Palestine—the imperatives of Zionism, the right of Palestinian self-determination, the Holocaust, the Nakba. These will never be fully reconciled, but all parties need to learn that sticking to one’s high moral principles is not incompatible with generosity with the other side, dealing justly towards others. And Lincoln recognized that the Union, much like Israel today, was much the stronger power, and the stronger power needed to make the first steps toward a lasting reconciliation.

This is a cautionary tale as well, of course. How to deal with “charity” to both the defeated Confederates and the freed slaves was a balancing act that probably was impossible, and in any event, in the hand of Lincoln’s successors, an utter failure. The white southerners won the peace, and the freed enslaved persons lost. It is not enough to end a war; one must have the commitment to end the problems that led to the war, and create the political and institutional structures to make this possible. With the failure of Reconstruction, the United States condemned itself to refighting the Civil War again and again, and we are still living with its consequences.

Perhaps the most important lesson of Lincoln’s second inaugural address was that nations and national leaders trying to end conflict need to know when to be pragmatic, how to cut short-term deals with opponents, and when to be visionary, remembering that without a broader vision, no lasting peace or reconciliation is possible. Benjamin Netanyahu has demonstrated that he is neither a pragmatist nor a visionary, but just a bumbler, a Franklin Pierce or a James Buchanan, vainly hoping the status quo will hold. If, to quote Lincoln’s first inaugural address, Israel and Palestine are ever to be places where “the better angels of our nature” are not drowned out by demons and devils, perhaps when Netanyahu finishes his speech today, he should pay a visit to the Lincoln Memorial.