Last chance for Mideast peace

Listen to Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider in the Oscar-winning 1987 movie Wall Street: "The point is, ladies and gentlemen, greed is good. Greed works, greed is right. And greed, mark my words, will save not only Teldar Paper but the other malfunctioning corporation called the USA." Now substitute the word greed for power, and you hook on to the philosophy that defined the previous administration's cynical and often bellicose neoconservative posture.

And just as Gekko was to get his deserts as the movie concluded, so was that administration's brazen modus operandi to get discredited when the American people chose Barack Obama as their new president, a man dedicated to bringing about "change that matters".

The old order is out, and the new sheriff is in town. Dare we hope, then, that America is now imbued with a new frame of mind?

Let me be clear: America has not changed, and will not any time real soon change, its basic, long-entrenched policies in regards to the Middle East. Lest we forget, Obama, in the first interview he granted to an Arab satellite TV station earlier this week, reiterated Washington's traditional commitments to the Zionist entity. "Israel will not stop being a strong ally of the United States," he said, "and I will continue to believe that Israeli security is paramount". But he did appear to genuinely reach out to Muslims around the world in his inaugural speech, a first for any American president.

So what we are seeing here is not so much a fundamental change in America's foreign policy as a shift in manner, style and tone. That's a significant shift, if you ask me, from the previous administration's pompous position that the US, with its limited area on the planet, and relatively small population, nevertheless was entitled to appropriate a disproportionate responsibility for shaping the world and defining what matters in the global dialogue of cultures. And the devil with what others think, for America is the master of the universe.

"Americans are not your enemy," Obama said, addressing Arabs and other Muslims, stressing the point that the moment was ripe for negotiations over the future of Palestine, a cause that I suspect he knows has dominated the inward pre-occupations, and political consciousness, of generations of Arabs.

To that extent, the new president's prompt dispatch of George Mitchell, his special Middle East envoy, to the region is "clear and tangible evidence", we are told by Mitchell himself, of Obama's commitment to building lasting peace. Those of us, who for years have followed the progress, or lack thereof, of other presidents' envoys to our part of the world, remain weary. Encouraging words, such as those uttered by Obama in recent days, are well and good, but they remain just that - words. And you don't judge a political leader on his words alone. We need to see not only "clear and tangible evidence" of good intentions, but clear and tangible evidence in coming months that this administration means business, that it will deliver, that it will not "play" us, as had other administrations in the past.

In theory, Obama can do anything, and that is so because no other president, in recent memory, has had such depth of support in the US. Whereas George W. Bush had effectively washed his hands of the Palestine conflict early on in office, Obama showed the importance he attached to the issue by appointing his new Middle East envoy a week after he entered the White House, signalling that it is, as it were, a new day.

So we hope. And we wait. This is clearly last call for a peace settlement in the Middle East. If the new administration cannot bring to an end the montrous evil that Israel has let loose on the Palestinians - an end to the unspeakable misery that remains endemic in their human affairs as an occupied people - then no other will. In short, if the Palestinians do not, and soon, gain their independence as a people, they will be doomed to living under a South African model of Apartheid (shades of which are already in place, what with roads built for the exclusive use of Jewish drivers, harrowing waits at checkpoints, midnight raids, that often turn violent, on patriots' homes, and the rest of it), a way of life that no people, regardless of their docile disposition, will accept.

Apartheid, of which military occupation is a variant, will in time destroy a people's hold on reality, and drive them to embrace the view that if they cannot choose the way they live, then to heck with it, they will choose the way they die.

I for one trust that Obama is genuine in his efforts to reach out to the Muslim world ("I have Muslim members of my family, and I have lived in Muslim countries", he said), just as I'm sure that the overwhelming majority of Muslims, in the Middle East and beyond, whom he has reached out to, will in equal measure genuinely reciprocate the gesture.

As far as Palestine is concerned, however, good intentions, evinced by the president and his very capable envoy, are not enough.

The question is whether the new sheriff in town is willing to knock heads in Israel, telling its leaders that its occupation of Arab lands is untenable, that the Arab peace initiative will not stay put on the table for ever, and that never again will the US condone the kind of cruelty they inflicted on the people of Gaza during their recent military assault, which resulted in the killing of 1,300 of the Strip's 1.5 million people, and the injury of more than 5000, reportedly as many as the number of Britons, per capita, killed by the German blitz in the Second World War.

Can he do it? I say yes he can, though in this case, I tell you, hope does not run eternal.

Fawaz Turki is a veteran journalist, lecturer and author of several books, including The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile. He lives in Washington D.C.