Obama
Signals Complete Surrender To Zionism And Its Lobby
19 September 2010By Alan Hart, MyCatBirdseat
- Obama commits U.S. to terror state with seven words"
"Ultimately the U.S. cannot impose a solution." -
He was speaking at the White House the day before the
start of the new round of direct talks between Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian
leader Mahmoud Abbas, after he had met with them and
Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King
Abdullah II. (In my last post I anticipated Obama
saying at the point of his complete surrender that
"America can't want peace more than the parties." He
also said that – ahead of schedule!)
Today there is a growing number of seriously well
informed people of all faiths and none (including me)
who believe there will only be peace if it is imposed.
Among those who have dared to say so in public is one
of the most eminent Jewish gentlemen of our time,
Henry Siegman. A former national director of the
American Jewish Congress, he is president of the
U.S./Middle East Project, which was part of the
Council on Foreign Relations from 1994 until 2006 when
it was established as an independent policy institute.
He is also a research professor at the Sir Joseph
Hotung Middle East Programme of the School of Oriental
and African Studies at the University of London.
During his more than 30 years of involvement in the
Middle East peace process, he has published
extensively on the subject and has been consulted by
governments, international agencies and
non-governmental organizations involved in the peace
process. In a comment piece for the Financial Times on
23 February 2010, (quoted in Conflict Without End? the
Epilogue to Volume 3 of the American edition of my
book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews), he wrote
this:
"The Middle East peace process and its quest for a
two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict
that got under way nearly 20 years ago with the Oslo
accords has undergone two fundamental transformations.
It is now on the brink of a third.
"The first was the crossing of a threshold by Israel's
settlement project in the West Bank; there is no
longer any prospect of its removal by this or any
future Israeli government, which was the precise goal
of the settlements' relentless expansion all along.
The previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who declared
that a peace accord requires Israel to withdraw `from
most, if not all' of the occupied territories,
`including East Jerusalem,' was unable even to remove
any of the 20 hilltop outposts Israel had solemnly
promised to dismantle.
"A two-state solution could therefore come about only
if Israel were compelled to withdraw to the pre-1967
border by an outside power whose wishes an Israeli
government could not defy – the US. The assumption has
always been that at the point where Israel's colonial
ambitions collide with critical US national interests,
an American president would draw on the massive credit
the US has accumulated with Israel to insist it
dismantle its illegal settlements, which successive US
administrations held to be the main obstacle to a
peace accord.
"The second transformation resulted from the
shattering of that assumption when President Barack
Obama – who took a more forceful stand against
Israel's settlements than any of his predecessors, and
did so at a time when the damage this unending
conflict was causing American interests could not have
been more obvious – backed off ignominiously in the
face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rejection
of his demand. This left prospects for a two-state
accord dead in the water."
On 16 August in a piece for the Huffington Post which
was originally published by Ha'aretz in Hebrew,
Siegman added this:
"Most Israelis, particularly the present government,
have been blithely indifferent to repeated
international condemnations of Israel's systematic
theft of Palestinian territory on which it has been
settling its own Jewish population in blatant
violation of international law. Yet their reaction to
what they see as an attack on the "legitimacy" of the
State of Israel, a concept foreign to international
law, seems to bring them to the edge of hysteria.
"In fact, Israel's legitimacy within its 1967 borders
has never been challenged by the international
community. It is its behavior on territory beyond its
own borders to which the international community –
including every U.S. administration – has objected. To
construe the condemnation of violations of
international law as anti-Semitism is absurd.
"It was not an anti-Semite seeking to delegitimize the
Jewish state, but Theodore Meron, an internationally
respected jurist and the legal advisor to Israel's
Foreign Ministry, who following the war of 1967
conveyed the following legal opinion to Israel's
Foreign Minister Abba Eban: `Civilian settlement in
the administered territories contravenes explicit
provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention,' to which
Israel is a signatory. That Convention's ban on
population transfer is `categorical and not
conditional upon the motives for the transfer or its
objectives. The Convention's purpose is to prevent
settlement in occupied territory of citizens of the
occupying state.'"
So yes, Israel's leaders knew that settlements on Arab
land occupied in 1967 are illegal. They simply didn't
give (and still today don't give) a damn about
international law. But this attitude, a mixture of
extreme arrogance and insufferable self-righteousness,
does not make them the main villains in the story of
what happened after June 1967. The main villains were
(and still are) the governments of the major powers
and the one in Washington DC above all.
What they should have said to Israel in the immediate
aftermarth of the 1967 war is: "You are not to build
any settlements on occupied Arab land. If you do,
you'll be demonstrating your contempt for
international law. In this event the international
community will declare Israel to be an outlaw state
and subject it to sanctions."
If something like that riot act had been read to
Israel there would have been peace many, many years
ago. The pragmatic Arafat was reluctantly reconciled
to the reality of Israel's existence inside its
pre-1967 borders as far back as 1968. In his gun and
olive branch address to the UN General Assembly on 13
November 1974 he said so by obvious implication.
Thereafter he put his credibility with his leadership
colleagues and his people, and his life, on the line
to get a mandate for unthinkable compromise with
Israel. He got it at the end of 1979 when the
Palestine National Council voted by 296 votes to 4 to
endorse his two-state policy. What he needed
thereafter was an Israeli partner for peace. He
eventually got a probable one, Yitzhak Rabin, but he
was assassinated by a Zionist fanatic. The more it
became clear that Israel's leaders were not interested
in a genuine two-state solution for which Arafat had
prepared the ground on his side, the more his
credibility with his own people suffered.
It is in the context briefly sketched above that
Obama's seven words have their real meaning.
At the time of writing it seems reasonably clear that
Obama is hoping that Abbas and his equally discredited
Fatah leadership colleagues can be bribed and bullied
into accepting what Netanyahu will eventually offer –
crumbs from Zionism's table. (My guess is that Abbas
at a point will resign rather than trigger a
Palestinian civil war). THE question is what will
Obama do when Israel refuses to give enough to satisfy
the demands and needs of the Palestinian people for a
just about acceptable measure of justice?
We already know the answer. "Ultimately the U.S.
cannot impose a solution."
Effectively those seven words tell Israel's leaders
that they can go on imposing their will on the
occupied and oppressed Palestinians with the comfort
of knowing that Obama is not going to use the leverage
he has, and every American president has had, to cause
them, or try to cause them, to be serious about peace
on terms virtually all Palestinians and most other
Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept, and which a
rational Israeli government and people would accept
with relief.
Put another way, those seven words are effectively a
green light for Zionism alone to determine the future
of the Palestinians, a future which at some point will
most likely see the final ethnic cleansing of
Palestine, followed by another great turning against
the Jews (provoked by the Zionist state's behaviour)
and a Clash of Civilizations, Judeo-Christian v
Islamic.
In his analysis on the day Obama delivered his seven
words, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC's admirable Middle East
Editor, offered this thought. "There might not be room
for many more failures. The conflict is changing. A
religious war is now being grafted on what used to be
fundamentally a competition for territory between two
national movements. You can make deals with
nationalists. It's much harder with people who believe
they're doing God's work."
The next question asks itself. Why won't Obama be the
president to call and hold the Zionist state to
account for its crimes, even when doing so is
necessary for the best protection of America's own
interests?
Part of the answer is, of course, that he is no more
willing than any of his predecessors to have a
showdown with the Zionist lobby and its stooges in
Congress and the mainstream media.
But there might be more to it.
In the privacy of his own mind Obama probably
understands better than any of his predecessors how
the conflict was created and what has sustained it. If
that is the case, he will also know there's no
guarantee that real American-led pressure on Israel to
be serious about peace would work and that it could be
counter-productive.
I am a supporter in principle of the case and the need
for the Zionist state of Israel to be totally
isolated, boycotted and sanctioned as Apartheid South
Africa was, eventually. But… The danger is that even
the credible threat of a real boycott and sanctions
could play into the hands of those Israeli leaders –
Netanyahu has long been their standard bearer – who
have brainwashed Israelis, most if not quite all, into
believing that the world hates Jews, always has and
always will, and that Israeli Jews have no choice but
to tell the world to go to hell. In this context (and
as I note in the Epilogue of the American edition of
my book), I think it could and should be said that
Zionism succeeded, probably beyond its own best
expectations, in transforming the obscenity of the
Nazi holocaust from a lesson against racism and
fascism and all the evils associated with them into an
ideology that seeks to justify anything and everything
the Zionist state does. War crimes and all.
So it could be that in the privacy of his own mind,
Obama knows it is already too late (not to mention too
dangerous) to try to push Israel's leaders much
further than they are willing to go.
What, I wonder, will honest historians of the future
make of what is happening right now? My guess is that
they will conclude that when Obama launched his push
for peace, the Zionist state was already a monster
beyond control.
Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign
correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever
they were taking place in the world and specialized in
the Middle East. His Latest book Zionism: The Real
Enemy of the Jews, is a three-volume epic in its
American edition. He blogs on
www.alanhart.netwww.twitter.com/alanauthor. and tweets
on
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