Opinion | Columnists
The tough Palestinian test
Questions linger whether Obama will full-heartedly take on the fight for peace in the Middle East and if he does turn the tide of his predecessor, he could find it tough to fight off pressure from powerful Israeli lobbyists.
- By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 23:30 November 21, 2008
The United States has one president at a time, and until Inauguration Day on January 20, George W. Bush (remember him?) will remain the chief executive, the very chief executive who for eight long years dillied and dallied, making extravagant promises about how assuredly a Palestine state will emerge on his watch. All of it, of course, came to naught.
There is no reason to assume that, once in the White House, President Barack Obama will place the Palestine conflict at the top of his list of priorities. His foreign policy advisers will no doubt be jostling to shift his focus from one international issue to another.
The US, after all, is a big power, and like all big powers in history, from imperial Rome to colonial Britain, has global issues to attend to, issues that can be identified as important, urgent, pressing or downright dangerous, depending on your assessment of them. But the one issue that President Obama cannot afford to ignore, that of Palestine, embodies all of these, and then some.
No need to stress here that the US should actively engage in arranging an equitable solution to that problem during the president's first term in office, both for moral and strategic reasons.
The moral reason is obvious: No human community should have to live under occupation for 40 years (and still counting), while being brutalised, robbed of its resources and denied the right to determine its own destiny.
The strategic reason is no less obvious. As Philip Stevens, a columnist for the Financial Times opined recently: "[The Palestine conflict] is the issue that more than any other shapes attitudes in the region towards the US... A deal between Israel and the Palestinians would change the game."
This sentiment is already conventional wisdom, even too pedestrian a notion to repeat, in the public debate in Europe. Not so in the US.
Will the new chief executive see the light? Folks, don't raise your hopes. Forget the fact that the first speech that Obama gave after winning the primaries was to AIPAC's annual conference in Washington, where he grovelled before the audience, assuring it that "Israel's security is sacrosanct" and dismissing the Palestinians as a "corrupt" lot.
Forget that his choice for chief of staff was the abrasive Rahm Emanuel, an ardent Israel advocate who had served in the Israeli army, and whose father, a right-wing Israeli bigot, had fought with the Urgun Gang. (Imagine the outcry by the Jewish community if Obama had chosen as his chief of staff an Arab American, with a record of extremist views on the Palestinians, and whose father, an anti-Semite, had been active in a terrorist gang?)
And forget even his trip to occupied Jerusalem at the tail end of his campaign where he evinced no compassion for the plight of the Palestinians. What is worth noting here is that Obama, by the look of things, will not aggressively assert the weight of his new administration to achieve a settlement of the Palestine conflict if that meant locking horns with Israeli leaders and their powerful lobbies in Washington. (Indulge the recollection here of the time when, while in the White House, President Jimmy Carter tried to do just that, and was made to back off, blaberring to the press that "I would rather commit political suicide than harm Israel".)
Takes courage
Add to that the fact that the polls suggest that Israel will elect for its next prime minister the fanatically hawkish Benjamin Netanyahou, whose major contribution to Israeli politics was to derail the Oslo peace process.
Why would Obama risk so much to broker a deal, or care less, not unlike his predecessors in the White House, that Arabs charge the US with double standards? People may have danced in the streets, all the way from Sydney to Paris, including the streets of some Arab capitals, when he was declared victor.
But the stubborn truth remains unchanged: America's Palestine policy continues to be, at a seminal level, rooted in the politics of special interests. A solution to the conflict in that part of the world, as mediated by the US, is not nearer achievement today than it was four decades ago. In fact, it has grown ever more complex and intractable, as facts on the ground would attest.
Would George W. Bush's successor then, the putative new broom that sweeps clean, adopt a bold, fresh and courageous (and yes, it does take courage in this instant) approach to the conflict and risk all for a final status agreement anchored in a two-state solution, especially in the first year or two of his presidency?
I do not have a crystal ball in front of me, so I can't hazard a prediction, but my sense is that Obama, with a recalcitrant Israeli prime minister not budging an inch, with Congressional leaders looking over his shoulder lest he "pressured" Israel, and with interest groups, such as powerful Jewish lobbyists and deranged Evangelicals, watching him like a hawk, will consider the task both costly and thankless.
Call that a disaster. The conflict in Palestine will not end on a note of grace all by itself. The Palestinians may be divided, weak and pauperised, but they are also an occupied people, and no people in history, victimised by an occupier, ever settled down to eat humble pie and take it all on the chin.
There is that in men, when shorn of national dignity, which loves resistance, which is less afraid of the terrors of death than the long boredom and humility of acquiescence to foreign masters.
One unassailable truth that Obama should acquaint himself with is this: A fair deal between Israel and Palestine would indeed change the game in the entire region, transforming the view that the mass of Arabs hold of the US as their enemy and exploiter.
Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including "The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile".
Opinion Editor's choice
-
Russia, China complicit in Syria carnage
By Fawaz Turki, Special to Gulf News
By their double veto at the UN, they have chosen to back the Al Assad regime that is already wet spaghetti
-
Two prime ministers in trouble
By Kuldip Nayar, Special to Gulf News
Gilani faces contempt of court charge while Singh encounters moral responsibility in 2G scam case
-
Moving towards honest democracy
By Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister of Russia
Russia needs to unbundle power and property and separate executive power from system of checks over it
Your turn
