When US President George W. Bush this week gave his first State of the Union address to the American people, he must have been aware that his speech was of even more importance to the rest of the world. In this unipolar world, an American president’s words and actions affect people everywhere as much as they do the Americans themselves.
US voters are, for the most part, lost within the immensity of their homeland and cocooned within the comfort of their economic wealth. For the majority of US citizens, the rest of the world is of no real interest. They are self-absorbed in their own prosperous universe, and beyond the foreign trip to look up their distant roots, they are unlikely to venture abroad, nor think much about the rest of the world. What Bush told them on Tuesday night was that he was going to make America safe from further attacks. He is going to do this regardless of the cost and wage his war against international terrorism for as long as it takes. And he was still going to cut their taxes. So much good news must have made Americans sleep better in their beds Tuesday night. But what about the rest of the world?
Every people have their own perception of what will make them sleep in peace. That perception cannot be the same for Israelis and Palestinians. No normal, sensible person or nation could fail to accept the need to stop terrorism; but while eliciting this support from its allies, be it voluntary or coerced, the Bush White House is increasing its support of Zionist terrorism against the people of Palestine. And his fight against terrorism will be targeted against not only out-and-out evil forces like Al-Qaeda, but also those groups who object to Israeli occupation. And this brings us perhaps to the heart of the problem. There is one group of Americans, other than wheeler-dealer businessmen, who cares deeply about keeping US foreign policy on the narrow track it is now: the Zionist supporters of an aggressive and expanding Israeli state. The world that the typically insular and uninformed American sees is the world according to Zionism. George W. Bush is a typical American. He cannot, or perhaps will not, see that the root of the instability which international terrorists like Al-Qaeda use as the excuse for their atrocities is the belligerent, grasping and unbending Zionist government of Israel.
Washington pours billions of dollars and massive amounts of armaments into Israel. Without this support, it would have to struggle hard just to survive. Bush, therefore, has the power, by turning off the tap, to bring Zionist terrorism to heel and transform at a stroke the world which Americans find so threatening. But America’s corridors of power are patrolled by vigilant Zionists, whose job is to keep Washington’s policy toward Israel unchanged.
The Palestinians who listened to the address must be still wondering what the president meant when he said, "America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere; no nation owns these aspirations, and no nation is exempt from them."
They will have enough time to work out the relevance of these words to them while facing -- in the days, months and probably years to come -- Israeli tanks, bulldozers, closures and American harangues about "Arafat not doing enough" .
