Franklin Delano Roosevelt, barely a month after his inauguration as president of the United States, and exactly four days after the conclusion of the Yalta Conference on Feb. 10, 1945, met with King Abdul Aziz Al-Saud aboard the USS Murphy on the Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal to discuss the question of Palestine, which was then, as it remains today, an issue of paramount political, emotional and historical significance to Saudi Arabia.
King Abdul Aziz told the American president, we read in FDR’s definitive biography by Ted Morgan, that given the brazen ambitions of Zionism in Palestine, “the Arabs and the Jews could never cooperate, neither in Palestine nor in any other country, and that the Arabs meant business.” Morgan writes: “The president seemed to be won over to the Arab cause, and later said in a press conference that he had learned more about Palestine in five minutes from ibn Saud than in his whole lifetime.” There was a catch, however. Before the meeting ended, the president had something further to explain. “Of course, he added, it was impossible to prevent resolutions in Congress.”
Nothing has changed since those days, in the American government’s disingenuous Palestine policy — nor, for that matter, in the Saudi government’s consistent concerns about the issue.
The New York Times reported on Sunday that former President Bush called Crown Prince Abdullah, the day before, to reassure him that the current president’s “heart” was in the right place when it comes to the Middle East. This was the second such call in the last few months. The purpose of the call by Bush, said the Times, whose unnamed sources were a senior administration official and a diplomat from the region, was to vouch for his son and to assuage concerns by the crown prince, who had complained that the current Bush administration is too close to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
In the phone call, Bush Sr. also urged Prince Abdullah to visit the US, an invitation that had been extended earlier by the White House but spurned by the crown prince, who has been very blunt in his criticism of the handling of the Palestine position and more outspoken against the excesses of the Sharon regime. “According to one of the accounts,” said the Times reporter, Jane Perlez, “Bush was in the room when his father made the call.”
There is no doubt about it: The US, as a peace broker, has lost clout not only in Saudi Arabia but in the entire Arab world. American influence and credibility in the region are today a far cry from where they stood after the first peace talks at the Madrid Conference in the fall of 1991, and may be at their lowest in more than a decade.
Since the collapse of the Camp David talks and the beginning of the uprising ten months ago, 700 Palestinians have been killed, the Palestinian economy has been destroyed, a new Israeli government has been elected that has put itself on a war footing and an expansionist track, and yet another generation of Palestinians appear to have been consigned to live under occupation and in exile.
Meanwhile, in Israel, the talk around the Israeli Cabinet and in key Israeli institutions like the army and Shin Bet is of mounting a devastating military attack aimed at “liquidating” Yasser Arafat and destroying the Palestinian Authority. This is not idle talk. Make no mistake about it. Ariel Sharon, with his pathological bent for violence, is not likely to give second thought to the international consequences that may result from such a knockout blow to the PA.
When examining the mindset of Zionist leaders, from Ben Gurion to Ariel Sharon, one must not make the mistake of extrapolating from one’s ordinary perceptions of other societies around the world. We are dealing with something outside the norm. Not only does Israel feel no guilt about it, but it has no conception of the fact that its existence is predicated on an injustice meted out to another people whose demands it has a moral obligation to address. Hampered by its historical amnesia, the Israeli entity in Palestine refuses to recognize that there are accounts to be balanced between itself and its victims.
This issue — of how in recent years modern nations have engaged themselves in the pressing question of collective guilt continues to be sidestepped by the Zionist movement. The state-sponsored efforts to dispatch entire human populations into the public memory hole, in Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, collaborationist France, apartheid-era South Africa, the American South of white supremacy, and latter-day Bosnia and Kosovo, are now being challenged internationally and in open forums. Japanese citizens, for example, have wrestled with the emperor’s role in prosecuting the last stages of World War II and with the revelations concerning the 1939 Rape of Nanking, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee, founded in 1995 to arrange for amnesty in exchange for public testimony from criminals who acted to shore up apartheid, has held hearings that, in some cases, were gut-wrenching.
In Israel, however, even the most ardent supporters of peace, and the most earnest of the so-called New Historians, who have tried to deal head on with the legacies of Zionism, continue to distance themselves from the heart of the matter, embracing the therapeutic rhetoric that is a form of moral amnesia all its own.
The news that Bush Sr. told Crown Prince Abdullah that his son’s “heart is in the right place” was made considerably less plausible by the statement of departing American ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, made in a speech recently to an Israeli audience, that he hoped “the Jewish state will triumph over its enemies.”
At the end of his recent trip to the Middle East, Secretary of State Colin Powell stopped in Paris to meet with the crown prince. Reportedly, Powell was chastised about Washington’s one-sided attitude in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with the prince graciously presenting his criticisms, we are told, in a “we are friends” manner.
There is a limit, however, to how much friends will take from friends.
