What Obama missed in the Middle East
When I and other Palestinian-Americans first knew Barack Obama in
In recent months, Obama has sought to allay persistent concerns from pro-Israel groups by recasting himself as a stalwart backer of
Like his Republican rival, senator John McCain, Obama gave staunch backing to
Every aspect of Obama's visit to Palestine-Israel this week has seemed designed to further appease pro-Israel groups. Typically for an American aspirant to high office, he visited the Israeli Holocaust memorial and the Western Wall. He met the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish (though not Israeli Arab) political leaders. He travelled to the Israeli Jewish town of
Other than a cursory 45-minute visit to occupied Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinians got little. According to an Abbas aide, Obama provided assurances that he would be "a constructive partner in the peace process." Some observers took comfort in his promise that he would get engaged "starting from the minute I'm sworn into office". Obama remained silent on the issue of
Many people I talk to are resigned to the conventional wisdom that aspiring national politicians cannot afford to be seen as sympathetic to the concerns of Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims. They still hope that, if elected, Obama would display an even-handedness absent in the campaign.
Without entirely foreclosing the possibility of change in US policy, the reality is that the political pressures evident in a campaign do not magically disappear once the campaign is over. Nor is all change necessarily for the better. One risk is that a President Obama or President McCain would just bring back the Clinton-era approach where the United States effectively acted as "Israel's lawyer", as Aaron David Miller, a 25-year veteran of the US state department's Middle East peace efforts, memorably put it. This led to a doubling of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, an upsurge in violence and the failed 2000 Camp David summit where Clinton tried to pressure Arafat into accepting a bantustan. A depressing feature of Obama's visit was the prominent advisory role for Dennis Ross, the official in charge of the peace process under Clinton, and the founder of an Aipac-sponsored pro-Israel think-tank.
Whoever is elected will face a rapidly changing situation in Palestine-Israel. A number of shifts are taking place simultaneously. First, the consensus supporting the two-state solution is disintegrating as Israeli colonies have rendered it unachievable. Second, the traditional Palestinian national leadership is being eclipsed by new movements including Hamas. And, as western and Arab governments become more craven in the face of Israeli human rights violations, a Palestinian-led campaign modelled on the anti-apartheid strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions is building global civil society support. Finally, the demographic shift in Palestine-Israel toward an absolute Palestinian majority in all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be complete in the next three to five years.
Making peace in this new reality will take leaders ready to listen and talk to all sides in the conflict and to consider alternatives to the moribund two-state solution, such as power-sharing, confederation or a single democratic state. It will require, above all, the courage, imagination and political will to challenge the status quo of Israeli domination and Palestinian dispossession that has led to ever more violence with each passing year.
Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and a fellow with the Palestine Centre in Washington, DC.
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The Sin of Despair
By Davidson, Carl at Aug 02, 2008 03:16 AM
I admit to the sin of despair when it comes to Palestine/Israel.
The best I can argue for is that the US government get out and have nothing to do with it, all around.
But even that is difficult with the presence and proliferation of nuclear weaons in the region.
In my youth, I had an idealistic vision, inspired by reading the views of the Democratic Popular Front for the Liberation on Palestine. They wanted a single secular state, where all faiths had equal rights, Jews, Muslims, Christians. Plus they were socialists, and want to unite all the workers there. It made perfect sense to me, viewing things from the perspective of a Scots-Irish American Catholic boy where half of my family didn\'t know or speak to the other half. While also sympathic to the injustice done to the Jews that helped created Israel, I was still solidly with Palestine. Later I met Hannan Aswari, and thought, with wonderful leaders like her, surely a settlement couldn\'t be far off. I also knew personally any number of Jews and Israelis who thought along similar lines.
Litlle did I know. The main thing I\'ve learned, I think, is that people don\'t act or vote simply for rational reasons. they also act out of their identities, which are narratives often with a mix of the rational and rational. Take the divisions in my own family\'s identities, and the irrationalities of both Papists and Presbyterians.
Most sane people know neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis can can kill or expunge all of \'the Other.\' I say \'most\' because there are a few who do, on both sides, even if rather small. That being the case, most people know a deal has to be made where all people are treated justly and fairly, and the killing must cease.
But the sin of despair sets in because even though most peole know it, it\'s also more of a minority position than ever, the divisons among the two peoples are greater than ever, and the only future being prepared in any realistic sense is the spilling of more blood, as if that misnamed \'Holy Land\' needed more blood-soaked soil. Yet that is what we are witness too, and helpless to do much more in any immediate way.
Give my original idealism, I\'m sympathetic to Ali\'s single state. Give my pragmatism, the two state \'solution\' appears to have more support, but \'appears\' is the key word here, and covers a lot of hypocrisy. But I\'ve also come to the opinion that if the two peoples concerned can\'t find common cause and common solutions, nothing we can try to impose from without is going to help. So I\'m back to despair. The best thing is to get our government to stop doing anything, cut off all the military money to everyone, since whatever it does, it only makes matter worse.
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