Israel in overtime
Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now lives in Jamaica. This is the ninth in his new series on the Obama era.
He will soon be the most powerful man in the world. So it’s understandable that, mere days into Israel’s massive attack on defenceless Gaza, US media pressure began building on Barack Obama to declare his position. But — apart from stonewalling about there being “only one US president at a time” — the President-elect remained silent.
Frustrated, the media turned to Obama’s Secretary of State pick, Hillary Clinton, long known as a pro-Israel hawk. (During the primaries, candidate Clinton had unburdened herself of some excited talk about “obliterating” Iran.) But — surprise! — Mrs Clinton, clearly warned by Obama’s people, fended off the questions with the same mantra: one US president at a time. The Obama administration-in-waiting was being out of step: leading US politicians and commentators had been falling over each other in their rush to denounce, not Israel’s high tech murder of Palestinian civilians, but Hamas’ puny defiance — never mind that Palestinian deaths were outnumbering Israeli deaths by a ratio of 100-to-1 (the ratio, incidentally, that has held for the past three years, during which Palestinians killed by Israeli forces have included 222 children).
Just as they’d done with Israel’s failed invasion of Lebanon in 2006, GW Bush and Condoleeza Rice, the lost black woman who has aimlessly wandered the world on Bush’s behalf these past years, repeatedly blocked a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire. Senate Leader Harry Reid thundered that “this terrorist organization, Hamas, has got to be put away.”
All this, while Arab television screens and the worldwide web were filling up with photos of dead or disfigured Palestinian children.
Outside of the US, Britain and Israel itself, it’s sobering to imagine the rage of the watching world at such essentially racist uncaring and bigotry. The US media pressed on, almost taunting Obama. The “one president at a time” mantra hadn’t, they observed, stopped him from calling for a ceasefire in South Ossetia in August, or from denouncing the “hateful ideology” of the Mumbai terrorists.
Still the President-elect remained silent.
Finally, when Israeli mortars killed 40 Palestinian civilians who had huddled for safety in a United Nations Gaza school, Obama allowed that “the loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern for me.” But that was all.
Baulked, some settled for recalling Obama’s remarks last July in the Israeli town of Sderot. “If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that,” he’d told reporters. (Indeed, Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak quoted Obama’s statement two weeks ago in justifying his country’s attack on Gaza.)
But others remained suspicious.
One voice that claimed to have no problem interpreting the President-elect’s silence was Ayman al-Zawahiri’s. Already on record as denouncing Obama as a “house negro” elected to do the bidding of his white masters (for al-Zawahiri knows a threat to his organization when he sees one), al Qaeda’s No 2 last week called the Israeli invasion of Gaza, “Obama’s gift to Israel.”
This hardly explained, however, why the Israelis clearly timed their barbaric business to get it over with before Obama becomes president. And it represented, surely, either a canny or a politically naïve misreading of Obama’s silence.
No one can begin to understand the often irrational and self-damaging distortions in US foreign policy towards the Middle East without recognizing the immense power of the Zionist lobby in US politics. For simply sharing a platform with Yasir Arafat’s wife back in 1999 while the latter made some militant remarks about Israel, Hillary Clinton had her New York Senate bid imperilled. And, fully a year before Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s brand-new primary campaign hit a major bump when, on the eve of an Aipac conference, the candidate suggested that “Nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people.”
That was only too obvious to most of the world. But sundry American Jewish leaders called Obama’s remark “odious” and “offensive.”
The most interesting critique was that it was “inexperienced”: Obama, it implied, ought to know that no one gets nominated, far less elected, in US presidential politics who shows the least empathy for the wretched plight of the oppressed Palestinians.
Obama spent much of the rest of his campaign duly affirming his support for Israel (when he wasn’t being taunted by Hillary Clinton to “both denounce and reject” Louis Farrakhan, who’d infamously called Judaism a “gutter religion”).
Now that he’s about to be president, however, it’s Obama’s real view of the world that matters. And Zawahiri, but for his own agenda, could easily have deduced that, since Obama could only have helped himself politically at home by supporting Israel’s invasion of Gaza, his silence ought really to be worrying the Zionist lobby, rather than the Palestinians and their supporters.
Now, to be clear, there are many Jews both inside and outside of Israel who have long been repelled by Israel’s expansionist agenda and brutal policies. In The Guardian of January 7, eg, Avi Shlaim, an Oxford professor who served in the Israeli army and “has never questioned the state’s legitimacy,” was unsparingly critical of Israel’s provocative actions towards Gaza before and during the recent ceasefire.
Wrote Shlaim: “Gaza is not simply a case of economic under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use the Biblical phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, into a source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods… Israel’s entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality towards the inhabitants of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came into force. During the ceasefire, Israel prevented any exports from leaving the strip, in clear violation of a 2005 accord, leading to a sharp drop in employment opportunities.
“Officially, 49.1% of the population is unemployed. At the same time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel, cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side of the border.”
At time of writing, it’s being reported that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is calling for an independent war crimes investigation in Gaza after reports that Israeli forces shelled a house full of Palestinian civilians, killing 30 people. After eight years of GW Bush’s catastrophic presidency, Obama will be coming to power in a world more disordered and endangered, including by the spectre of global economic meltdown, than any president in living memory has had to face. His most immediate challenge is of course the US economy, sinking almost daily as an impotent world watches (and awaits its effect on them).
But ‘the Palestinian issue’ is at the heart of the wider world’s flashpoints. And, given America’s kneejerk support for Israeli aggression, Obama will need the diplomatic genius of a Toussaint l’Ouverture if he is to intervene in it in a way that is, quite simply, humane and fair — and that doesn’t leave him crippled in office for doing so.