Sometimes it takes someone from the outside, like U.S. President Barack Obama, to show up and tell it like it is to the Israelis: You’ve got a wonderful country, you’re wise and just, you suffered and you deserve a state, and as long as the United States exists you’ll never stand alone – but for God’s sake, enough! Stop the settlements, stop the occupation, stop the deportations, stop the ongoing abuse of the Palestinians, and stop the settlers’ violence. Enough.
That’s how the left interpreted Obama’s speech in Israel. The right yawned and said that the Arabs aren’t interested in peace.
I didn’t hear the speech nor have I read anything but this about it yet. If thats what he said, I hope to hell they listen. Israel lost my sympathy some time ago.
From the linked article:
Obama is undoubtedly pro-Israel, no less than his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton were. But he is no blind follower of the Israeli government, or of the schtick Netanyahu regularly pulls in an effort to stall for time, again and again.
Can I have some of what this writer is smoking? If he wasn’t blind he’d have gotten Netanyahu to stop the settlements. Because a two state solution is pretty much dead at this point. Hell, with each passing day I’m growing more convinced the U.S. and Israel are perfectly pleased with the way things are. Why? The MIC, baby!!
The MIC, yes. This is why I do not adhere to the Israeli-lobby theory. “If only that Israeli lobby wasn’t so powerful, our policies would be different.” Bullshit.
At best, our Israeli policies would be like our Chinese policies: a lot of sizzle, no steak. And in the end, the results for the Palestinians would be the same.
This is why I do not adhere to the Israeli-lobby theory.
So AIPAC is just an extension of the MIC?
No, but AIPAC is essentially irrelevant to our policies. At best, they stifle conversation; they do not control our foreign policy. You know who loves that theory? White supremacist, antisemites like David Duke.
Really? So, I guess people like Max Blumenthal and M.J. Rosenberg love David Duke too.
Joseph Massad:Blaming the Israel Lobby
While many of the studies of the pro-Israel lobby are sound and full of awe-inspiring well- documented details about the formidable power commanded by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its allies, the problem with most of them is what remains unarticulated. For example, when and in what context has the United States government ever supported national liberation in the Third World? The record of the United States is one of being the implacable enemy of all Third World national liberation groups, including European ones, from Greece to Latin America to Africa and Asia, except in the celebrated cases of the Afghan fundamentalists’ war against the USSR and supporting apartheid South Africa’s main terrorist allies in Angola and Mozambique (UNITA and RENAMO) against their respective anti-colonial national governments. Why then would the US support national liberation in the Arab world absent the pro-Israel lobby is something these studies ne! ver explain.
I am not saying it’s not influential, or has zero influence. But it does NOT affect how we deal with the Middle East and Israel.
But it does NOT affect how we deal with the Middle East and Israel.
It’s certainly a signifier. Of course it really doesn’t affect, over all, how we deal with Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. It does affect Israel. They are the proxy for the Likudniks(like Netanyahoo).
If he wasn’t blind he’d have gotten Netanyahu to stop the settlements.
By sheer force of will, I imagine. Obama just needs to give 110%, and Likud would abandon its core policy and its core voting bloc.
Netanyahu – Sept. 20, 2002: The Case For Toppling Saddam
Ah yes, only those that imagined WMD in Iraq were rational.
Fiction stated as fact.
We were stuck with GWB in 2002 before he fully displayed his true ill-intent, but Israelis chose this irrefutable fantasist or raving lunatic as their leader well after the fact.
It gets worse:
In one of his speeches, the US President called far the recognition of a Jewish State of Israel. He just threw the Israeli Arabs under the bus, because he followed the Netanyahu rhetoric and defended a racist state that will NEVER be accepted by the Palestinian people or the Arab states in the Middle-East.
From my diary in October 2012 …
No, Oui! Israel can be both a Jewish state AND Democratic. Zionism isn’t racism; what are you, an antisemite?
Israel can be an occupier, settler, agriculturalist, secure its homeland and steal Palestinian land, demolish their homes and uproot their olive trees all at once. If you don’t like it, our Army will take care of you.
Rethinking Israel-Palestine: Beyond Bantustans, Beyond Reservations
Upon its establishment, Israel passed a series of laws that privileged its Jewish inhabitants and further dispossessed and marginalized its non-Jewish indigenous population. Two laws are particularly relevant: the Citizenship Law (1952) bifurcated Jewish nationality from Israeli citizenship and denationalized the Palestinian population. In doing so, the state instantly created a two-tiered system of rights: one available for Jews, who could be both nationals and citizens, and one for non-Jews, who could be citizens only. The Law of Return (1950) extended the right to Israeli citizenship and associated state benefits to any Jewish person, now a Jewish national as well, anywhere in the world.
Together these laws ensured that Jewish persons who lived beyond Israel’s boundaries and had no relationship to it had more rights than the state’s own non-Jewish Palestinian citizens, even when their meager numbers did not constitute one-fifth of Israel’s population, as they do today. Not only was a nascent Israel cementing its Jewish demographic majority, but by instituting a series of similar laws, it also preserved Jewish political, social and economic privilege.
I’m waiting for the wingers to call treason on the socialist Kenyan usurper for daring to confront Netanyahu on the settlements….
Did he never understand why the Jewish State is in Palestine and not, say, Madagascar?
First, there is and has been all along the purely religious conviction of an ancient, divine land grant that justified conquest, genocide, and religious tyranny at the time and justifies forcible re-possession today.
Second, there is and has been all along a secular, moral conviction that a national state more than 2,000 years in the past justifies forcible re-creation of another for the same nation in the same territory, even at the cost of conquest and forcible removal of a civilized community established some 1300 years ago.
And, last, there is and has been since the end of The Second World War a conviction abroad in America mightily encouraged by American liberals and especially Jewish American liberals that gentile Europe and America have a moral obligation to support and defend Israel because of the Holocaust that much of Europe joined Germany is perpetrating and the rest, along with America, failed to prevent.
The first two define the enterprise of Zionism, and have done so from the beginning.
The last is the hook still in the mouths of America, the nations of Western Europe, and Germany.
The Jewish conquest of Palestine began at the end of the 19th Century and has continued since then without interruption.
Those who support Israeli expansion today are only supporting continuation of a process that was not even significantly interrupted, let alone ended or completed, with the UN creation of Israel in 1948.
In the nature of the case, that process can end only with the complete establishment of a Jewish State extending over pretty much the whole territory of the ancient Jewish state, at its high point.
However much Israel has in common with the general run of European settler states created by the wave of European colonialism and imperialism that began in the Age of Columbus, it’s really something different in important ways.
And it’s that difference that is the basis for an Israeli intransigence putting in the shade the comparatively flaccid wills of the French in Algeria, the Brit colonists in Kenya, or the white tribe of South Africa.
All the same, Americans and others who pin their hopes on partition and establishment of a Palestinian state in the belief that the so-called two-state solution might actually solve anything and end the conflict, bringing about Muslim acceptance of the Jewish State and real peace in the region do not understand the issue.
The Muslims vis-à-vis the Jewish State are in the position of the Muslims vis-à-vis French Algeria, or the local Africans vis-à-vis English settler Kenya or white South Africa.
They did not aim at partition but at re-conquest of settler states by the local peoples.
Israel’s Muslim opponents don’t aim at partition, now, but at the re-conquest and erasure of the Jewish State.
Still, though I would obviously not be pleased to see the Jewish people of Israel wiped out or driven into the sea by genocidal Muslim irredentists in a reversal of the Spanish Reconquista, I don’t see how any of this is really our problem.
Truman was wrong to endorse the creation of Israel and he was wrong to commit the US to its defense.
America is wrong today to waste its treasure and its blood trying to make the Middle East safe for this anachronistic renew of the ancient Jewish State.
We should end all our guarantees to Israel and all our aid.
If the EU or the UN or anyone else wants to step in and support Israel in our place, let them do so.
Not our problem.
No more than Rwanda.
Oh, and I would likewise not agree with any demands that America somehow undo establishment of the State of Israel, join in its destruction, assist in removal of the Jews from Palestine, or ever pay a penny in so-called compensation or reparations for our support of Israel for all this time.
Assuming we aren’t somehow blackmailed or bullied into it.
Juan Cole has some more reactions. The settlers see the tone of the visit as deceptive–honey words presaging a stab-in-the-back.
Generally Israeli politicians are fools. They now have maneuvered Israel into being an apartheid state and they are under the illusion that this makes them safe from terrorism. They have sown the destruction of the state of Israel by not pursuing justice. And it will be endless war for them trying to enforce apartheid. But it will eventually fail, and the stronger they cling to the idea of theft of the land because of some 2000-year claim in a book that is believed only by them, the more certain the destruction of the state of Israel when that claim is repudiated.
The criminal part of this is the US subsidization of this injustice to the tune of $3 billion a year. That’s $10 a person in the US that every citizen is paying to keep the boot on the Palestinians.
And of course, we will continue to get the blowback from this policy.
Obama capitulated to Netanyahu and Likud still hates him.
In a broad stroke, watching the reactions he was getting from the audiences, it seemed much more like Obama was giving them a taste of their dream of what they can be. He spoke to the vision of the day after peace and how both sides would build a new strength.
Decades have passed where the people, and the world, has been taught to perceive this these peoples as failures in negotiating peace. In a subliminal way, they have now internalized the expectation of failure.
So when I watched Obama’s interaction I caught glimpses of a people listenting closely to someone who said he had great faith in their ability to be successful. He lit a fire and the rooms were electric.
Who was it, dear old Stephen Covey?, who used to say that if you want to be successful then choose to act like a successful person.
I could hardly blame folks around the world for writing off the people of the United States after George W. Bush was re-elected. I remember the UK’s Daily Mirror cover story: “How can 59,054,087 be so dumb?”
I think about this when I reflect on the course of Israel and Netanyahu’s electoral successes, because it reminds me that even in those times, there was a nearly equal number of people horrified about what was being done in their county’s name, but unable to alter their country’s political course. I imagine it must be like that in Israel.
If I reasoned only on the basis of GWB’s re-election, I would have had no reason to expect that our current president would be elected to even a single term. Fortunately, Mr. Obama and his advisors saw past that.
Israelis who believe in a universal, rather than a strictly tribal, concept of justice have not been heard from in some time. The president has asked them to stand up and be counted. I’m not all that hopeful, but then again I doubted my own country at a time when Mr. Obama saw an opportunity for change.
The only force that can restrain the Israeli right is the Israeli left, and there is not Israeli left anymore.
Obama’s speech was an attempt to revive one; to demonstrate that Israeli patriotism and security can be consistent with liberal values.
Of course there is an Israeli left, but it has to redefine itself. It’s somewhat comparable to the Democratic Party prior to Howard Dean (2003/4). This is a good time to do so, as the Israeli right, along with Netanyahu himself, has recently lost a lot of power in the Knesset. Don’t expect overnight change, but this has started a salutory ferment.
There’s an Israeli left in the same sense that there’s an American socialist movement.
There used to be an Israeli left worth taking notice of, but it was decimated over the last decade or so. Remember Peace Now? Once upon a time, that was a movement with real significance, and now, that vision is a tiny fringe.
The comparison to the Democratic Party in 2003/4 is off, because the Democrats were winning over 45% of the vote at that time, while parties advocating for anything that resembles the traditional left of Israeli politics can barely keep the lights on these days.
What needs to happen isn’t for Kadima to move marginally left, like the Democrats did between 2002 and 2006. What needs to happen is for a bloc that is currently down in the single digits to become a major electoral and messaging force. It isn’t about party re-branding, but about a major shift in the country’s political culture.
And that, I think, is why Obama spoke his message to an audience of university students, and not the Knesset or the Labor convention.
That’s what I meant by the left redefining itself. If all that’s going to count as the Israeli left is the socialist party, right, it’s not much different from the American socialist party. But if you think that everyone who is not right wing in Israel is summed up in that small component, you’re wrong. Israel has no effective moderate left party. But it has a moderate left constituency.
or “Begin with the End in Mind”
Obama’s failure in his first term required to reset lost stature with Israeli public/perception. Negotiations can only proceed and be succesful behind closed doors as the Norwegians illustrated with the Oslo accords. I had no confidence in Hillary Clinton and her minions in the State Department. If there is no step forward within one year, your pessimism will hold true. For the last 20 years I have kept a faint candle of hope burning, how difficult it has been at times.
The Arab revolt and the overthrow of the Assad regime will be cause of grave concern for the State of Israel. The madman of Teheran will be replaced by the monarchs of the Gulf States and King Abdullah of the land of the two holy shrines. The crown-prince was quite upset with the Bush regime for the rejection of his Arab initiative to make peace with Israel in 2002. The kingdom of Jordan is next in line to fall to the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist movement. The goal of Al Sham comes closer.
In biblical terms of a timeline, the founding of the state of Israel is in its infancy.
Upon leaving Israel, Obama convinces Netanyahu (his friend Bibi) to make a call – Netanyahu apologizes to Turkey over 2010 Gaza flotilla deaths.
That apology is as hollow as ones by the likes of people like Ezra Klein this week.
The Obama administration was widely reported to have set aside the peace process in Palestine during the first time on the grounds that it was a hopeless task, and his time would be better spent on other efforts. During that first term, he instead passed the most extensive legislative agenda of any president since Lyndon Johnson, while ending the Iraq War and concentrating on the Af-Pak and al Qaeda wars.
Now, Iraq is done, Afghanistan is on the glide path, and al Qaeda is on the ropes. Meanwhile, the passage of legislation through the Republican House makes an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal seem downright easy.
So maybe he’ll make that a second-term priority.
I usually don’t blame Obama for anything on the Israel Palestine issue because Israel controls the US Congress on such issues, but this whole trip…!
I get that we can’t treat Israel as best serves American interests, but telling them they are wise, just and deserve an ethno-religious based state? Ugh.
I usually don’t blame Obama for anything on the Israel Palestine issue because Israel controls the US Congress on such issues, …
And who was once part of that Congress that asks how high when AIPAC says jump?
but telling them they are wise, just and deserve an ethno-religious based state?
A message of “You guys suck, you have no right to exist, your national enterprise should be pulled up by the roots” might make American anti-Zionists feel good, but it’s probably not a terribly effective way to shift Israeli public opinion on the actual issues.
Pulling their “national enterprise … up by the roots” would entail creating even more suffering so I hope Obama doesn’t say that!