Obama is good for Israel

Barack Obama has pledged that, if elected President of the United States, he will travel to a "major Islamic forum" in the first 100 days of his Administration to deliver the clear message that "we are not at war with Islam".

This is a strong signal that Obama believes George W. Bush's lethal confrontation with the world of Islam needs most urgently to be defused.

Obama has not specified where he plans to deliver his friendly message to Islam, but one can only speculate that it might be at a summit meeting of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference - an association of 65 Muslim states - or in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's holiest shrines, or at Egypt"s Islamic university of Al Azhar, or even perhaps in war-torn Iraq.

His bold pledge was made in a comprehensive policy speech in Washington last August, in which he denounced the catastrophic war in Iraq - a war "that should never have been authorised and should never have been waged".

Instead, he affirmed - what he has since frequently repeated - that he would withdraw US combat troops from Iraq, engage in talks with Iran and Syria, and take the fight to America's real enemies, the Al Qaida terrorists hiding in their tribal sanctuaries of northwest Pakistan.

He also said that "When I am President, America will reject torture without exception ... close Guantanamo ... adhere to the Geneva Conventions ... and roll back the tide of hopelessness that gives rise to hate". America , he added , "must also do the hard and sustained diplomatic work in the [Middle East] region on behalf of peace and stability."

These views have caused considerable alarm among Israeli hawks, and among their even more hawkish American supporters.

Would a President Obama, they ask with some anxiety, use American muscle to impose a resolution on Israel of the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict and bring to birth a viable Palestinian state - something Israel and its friends have always sought to avoid?

The fear of the Israeli hawks - and it is probably justified - is that whereas Obama is of course committed to the security of Israel, he is not the unconditional and uncritical supporter which Bush has been over the past seven years.

In their eyes, Obama is guilty of the unforgivable heresy of saying at different times that "the Israeli government must make difficult concessions for the peace process to restart"; that "nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people"; and that "the creation of a wall dividing the two nations [of Israel and Palestine] is yet another example of the neglect of this Administration in brokering peace".

Earlier still - even before the 2003 invasion of Iraq which he opposed - Obama denounced the pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, who were pressing the United States to make war on Saddam Hussain.

At an anti-war rally in Chicago on October 26, 2002, he declared: "What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration, to shove their own ideological agenda down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne".

Perle was then chairman of the Pentagon's advisory Defence Policy Board and Wolfowitz was deputy Secretary of Defence. As everyone knows, their "ideological agenda" was to enhance Israel's strategic environment by overthrowing and "reforming" Arab regimes.

They were, indeed, among the leading advocates of the view that the Arab world needed to be reshaped and remodelled by the power of the United States in order to suit Israeli strategic needs.

For the US and Israel to be safe, Arab societies had to be reformed, if necessary by force - beginning with Iraq. Once Saddam's Iraq had been smashed and reconstituted, Syria, Iran, even Egypt and Saudi Arabia, could then be given the same treatment.

In Barack Obama's view, such dangerous ideas have led to "a misguided invasion of a Muslim country that sparks new insurgencies, ties down our military, busts our budgets, increases the pool of terrorist recruits, alienates America, gives democracy a bad name, and prompts the American people to question our engagement in the world". He wants to turn the page.

Israel's hardline supporters do not like this line of argument one bit. They have even insinuated that Obama attended a "madrasa", when he was a child in Indonesia; that he may be a secret Muslim; that he attends a church headed by a former Black Muslim, who is viscerally anti-Israel.

These pro-Israeli hawks do not want the US to make peace with Islam, but rather to intensify the fight against what they like to call "Islamo-fascism". They do not want the US to reach out to Iran, but rather to intimidate it and, if possible, destroy its economy.

The neo-con patriarch, Norman Podhoretz, wants the US to bomb Iran, not to engage it in dialogue. Podhoretz happens to be the father-in-law of Eliot Abrams, the hardline official in charge of the Middle East at the US National Security Council.

The key question is this: whose policy is best for Israel?

Israel and its friends should perhaps consider whether resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict is not better for Israel than the present violent confrontation; and whether defusing America"s hostile relations with Iran, Syria and Hezbollah might not be better for Israel than having these angry and threatening neighbours on its borders.

Instead of fearing and smearing Obama, Israel and its friends might consider that he just might be the US President who can bring peace to the Middle East at last, and effect a much needed reconciliation between the West and Islam.

Is not overseeing Israel's peaceful integration into the Arab world far better for its long-term security and prosperity than Bush's bankrupt policies of making war on Iraq, threatening Iran and Syria, encouraging Israel's wars on Hezbollah and Hamas - policies which have done nothing but create a thirst for revenge and hate for the US and Israel throughout the Arab and Islamic world, and beyond?

Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs.