On the Middle East part of his overseas trip, Barack Obama’s visit to Ramallah was meant to make amends. It marked him out from his Republican rival John McCain — who has yet to visit the West Bank — and went some way to addressing Palestinian concerns about his recent statement that Jerusalem would remain the “undivided capital of Israel.”
But the damage had already been done. In his June 4 speech to the American Israeli Political Action Committee, Obama betrayed the Arab hopes that had been invested in him. In one speech he managed to destroy every iota of hope he had generated in millions of human beings just the night before — in his acceptance speech after he had sewn up the Democratic Party nomination.
Having some sort of Muslim background and a Muslim middle name, Obama is expected by Arabs to be at least moderate in his views on the Palestinians. Being black in America, Obama is supposed to know what it is to be oppressed, as the Palestinians are. But Obama is not anti-Semite, is not soft on Hamas (he has said Hamas is a “terrorist organization” which has no place at the negotiating table, the conventional US position), not pro-Palestinian, not a Muslim, and neither he nor his wife, as depicted on the cover of the New Yorker, are Muslim sympathizers.
When confronted with accusations, people have to defend themselves, and Obama upped the ante to prove that he was not only a friend of Israel, but more pro-Israel than McCain and any Israeli, so on top of everything else he made an executive decision right then and there that Jerusalem was the eternal capital of Israel.
Jerusalem, of course, is not Obama’s to give to anyone, least of all an occupation that has stolen another people’s homeland at gunpoint and forced them into exile and refugee camps. Like the rest of Palestine, Jerusalem belongs to Palestinians.
Continuing with his magnanimous offerings to Israel and the people he thinks are indispensable to his campaign for the White House, Obama further adds he would start his relationship with his Israeli friends by ensuring the Jewish state’s qualitative military advantage by providing $30 billion in assistance to it over the next decade — investments in security not granted to any other nation.
Obama later clarified his position on Jerusalem, but his argument that he had been guilty of poor phrasing and that he was not trying to predetermine final status issues is baseless. He said what he said, and did so for a reason. Obama has become a “friend of Israel” who is in dire need of hearing from powerful people, or about-to-become powerful people, that they are friends of Israel. Israel is very conscious of its political illegitimacy and thus seems to be in urgent and insatiable need of powerful friends, who will assure and reassure it that they are its friends and will protect it. The Jewish state is in need of such constant reassurances only because it knows better than anyone else that it has been conducting an illegitimate operation from day one — with the help, aid and assistance of its past, present and future “friends.”
So the people in the Middle East need not pin too many hopes on an Obama administration taking a different approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict than has successive US administrations followed.
