The headline is not meant to imply that I think he will. As things are he can’t because of the stranglehold on American policy for Israel/Palestine of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress, the mainstream media and many institutions of state including the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. My purpose is only to offer an answer to this question: What could happen if President Obama was able to put America’s own real interests first?
The answer has to begin with the statement (echoed by Mearsheimer and Walt and a growing number of respected and influential others) that unconditional support for the Zionist state of Israel right or wrong is not in America’s own best interests because it’s a prime cause of Arab and other Muslim hurt and humiliation, which is being transformed into a rising tide of anti-Americanism. To that can be added a related truth. America doesn’t have to have 1.5 billion Muslims (nearly one quarter of humankind) as enemies. Most Muslims do not hate America or Americans. What they do hate is the double-standard of American (and all Western) foreign policy, in particular its refusal to call and hold Israel to account for its crimes.
To put anti-Americanism into its true Arab perspective, I offered this thought in the Introduction to The False Messiah, Volume One of the American edition of my book, Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews (www.claritypress.com).
If it had been possible for an American President to wave a magic wand and have Israel back behind more or less its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war, with a Palestinian state in existence on the Arab land from which Israel had withdrawn as required by UN Security Council Resolution 242, and with Jerusalem an open, undivided city the capital of two states, the U.S. would have had, overnight, with one wave of that magic wand, the respect, friendship and support of not less than 95 per cent of all Arabs and very probably that of almost all Muslims everywhere. And if the President had also pressed the Arab regimes to be serious about democratizing their countries, the U.S. would have become the champion of the Arab masses, truly admired by them as it was when President Woodrow Wilson was in the White House.
In passing I’ll add that since I first wrote those words, I have addressed Arab and other Muslim audiences up and down the UK, in America and Canada and as far afield as India. On each and every platform I asked audiences if I was naïve for believing that an American president who did whatever was necessary to secure justice for the Palestinians would be rewarded with the respect, friendship and support of almost all Arabs and other Muslims. The answer was always the same. My figure of 95 per cent was almost certainly an under-estimate.
But since that response was conveyed to me things have got much worse. With his abject surrender to Netanyahu and the Zionist lobby, Obama has not only drawn public attention to America’s complicity in Israel’s defiance of international law, he is out-doing President George “Dubya” Bush in the business of targeted assassinations with drones over Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan. The death toll of innocents killed is rising rapidly. Islam’s men of violence in that part of our world could not have a more effective recruiting sergeant.
What’s happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan (not to mention Iraq) underlines the fact that a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict on terms acceptable to the vast majority of Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere would not be enough to extinguish the fire of anti-Americanism, but it would make containing it a much more manageable proposition.
There are, in fact, firemen waiting to assist Obama (or his successor) to put it out completely. They are the leaders of Iran, Hizbollah, Hamas and the Taliban. America’s own real interests would be best served by Obama himself (or his successor) seriously engaging with them, taking full account of their concerns and fears.
There is no evidence (only Zionist assertion) that Iran’s divided ruling mullahs have any intention of developing nuclear weapons, but it would not be surprising if elements in Iran – the Revolutionary Guard? – are making a case for nuclear weaponization for the purpose of deterrence.
What Iran’s leaders and also those of Hizbollah, Hamas and the Taliban want most of all is an end to American exceptionalism, for which read imperialism, and all the arrogance, bullying and interference, as well as the killing, maiming and destruction, that comes with it.
On Israel-Palestine real positions (as opposed to Zionist assertions about them) are clear. Hamas is explicitly on the record with the statement that while it will not formally recognise Israel’s right to exist, it is pragmatically prepared to accept Israel’s actual existence inside its 1967 (pre-war) borders and to live in peace with it. And though they don’t say so openly, Iran and Hizbollah have a common pragmatic position. They will accept, reluctantly no doubt, whatever the Palestinians accept.
An American president who was free to put the best interests of his own nation and people first would now give priority to talking constructively to “the enemy”. With the assistance of the leaders of Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas, Obama (possibly at the risk of assassination) could create a whole new Middle East, one in which justice for the Palestinians and peace and security for all could flourish. (I’m sure that most of us would welcome a return to the days when we could check into an airport without being treated as a possible or probable terrorist).
It is, of course, true that there are powerful vested interests in the U.S. (Jewish and non-Jewish) which actually believe that unconditional support for Israel right or wrong is in America’s best interests. Because they are not completely stupid, they know this policy is not cost free. The presumption has to be that they also believe the cost in terms of American blood and treasure is a price worth paying. Hopefully the time is coming when enough Americans will say to them: “Stop this madness! You’re wrong. It’s not a price worth paying.”
For the neo-cons and their associates who marshal and deliver support for Israel right or wrong, and who by so doing subvert what passes for democracy in America, I have a New Year message. Learn the lesson of America’s costly and catastrophic adventure in Vietnam. It doesn’t matter how powerful you are militarily, you cannot destroy ideas with bullets and bombs, especially ideas rooted in the need for self-determination, justice and human and political rights.
I have no expectation that Zionism can learn this lesson. I believe it, Zionism, to be congenitally incapable of doing so. But one day most if not all Americans will learn it – won’t they…?
Footnote
It was in Vietnam as a very young correspondent for ITN (Independent Television News), when I was observing the U.S. spending six million dollars a minute on a war it could not win and should not have waged, that I first started to ask myself questions about why things are as they are in the world. Some years later the notion that America could not have won the war in Vietnam was challenged by Senator Barry Goldwater in private conversation with me. In 1964 this five-term senator from Arizona was the Republican Party’s nominee for president. He didn’t make it to the White House in part because President Johnson branded him as an extremist who might plunge America into a nuclear war. When I was on assignment for the BBC’s Panorama programme, Goldwater said to me in his Senate office: “We could have won the war in Vietnam. We should have nuked the North. What’s the point in spending so much money on developing nuclear weapons if you’re not prepared to use them?” (With Iran and North Korea on their minds, I imagine that some of today’s neo-con nuts agree with that. And I note that after he failed to secure a second term, perhaps because he offended the Zionist lobby too much by wanting to be serious about peacemaking in the Middle East, former President Bush the First said that his dream was of a “winnable nuclear war”).
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A price worth paying...it rings a bell. It reminds me of Madeleine Albright and the hundred thousands of dead children old folks those in need of health care and her infamous answer.
I think it's high time to not waste anymore time on what Obama could do had he the "cojones"...but maybe it's not so much of "cojones" but rather a matter of being a true human being, with a heart, a conscience. High time to face the facts that Obama is a psychopath and a lot one worse than Bush was.
Bush must be laughing out loud...
Alan it is not only Arabs and other Moslems who are against what the US does. They have a weird way of thinking: so-called Christians, always wanting an enemy to fight, overloaded with guns,the only "civilised" country with the death penalty, assasinations okay for almost anyone (think of Assange but also poor Bradley Manning). How the European Union and so many other countries' leaders let them get away with it is terrible, and the reason Israel can continue it's illegal actions.
I was telling a friend in the Mid East that it's strictly control of the media that makes Americans react the way they do to the region. The 1997 sci-fi movie "Stargate" got great audience response for helping Palestinian-like peoples in the "Kalium" galaxy to liberate themselves from the Israeli-like Ra. That's the normal response of Americans to what is going on in the West Bank and Gaza. Obama is simply the parakeet in this guilded Faraday cage of propaganda. I'm really concerned about his (and the first lady's) behavior at every turn. Who gives them this advice? Like going to Hawaii with the family and having "fun in the sun" while 60% of Americans are freezing and/or stuck in areas where municipal budgets strained by the economy do not allow efficient snow removal!
Alan, is it really your position that a fifth of a loaf, without control of the fresh water resources to wash it down with, is better than none, and people of good will, or pragmatic people anyway, should accept such a deal as payment in full of the debt of justice that the world owes to the Palestinian people?
Your repeatedly proffered solution of a Palestinian rump state or "Bantustan" within lines of the occupied Palestinian territories of 1967, at one stroke denies justice for the victims Nakba of 1947-1949, and grants international legality to the existence of Israel as a religio-ethnic Jewish Apartheid state and hegemonic power over the adjacent Palestinian rump state.
Such a solution depends upon international recognition of a coopted, corrupt Palestinian leadership, who are prepared to sell their brothers' and sisters' birthright to live with full rights in all of Palestine/Israel, for a measure of illegitimate power, doled out by Israel and its backers: the USA and the EU.
Alan, please throw your considerable influence to support the only just and durable democratic solution: a unitary democratic state guaranteeing full political, economic, cultural, and human rights for all nationals of Israel/Palestine, as well as all refugees of the Nakba and their direct descendants.
The pragmatic "two-state" solution stinks to high heaven.
Obama was hired by the zionists lobby as US president to "clean the Augean stables" Bush left. Arabs and muslims don't hate american people. But they are eagger to see them awake and firmly standing in their boots against the zionists monster in America. Indeed "We are all palestinians".
Alan: Question of timing of the US. in Vietnam and what was happening in the zionization of Palestine. Probably way off Americas concerns during these War Years. Has any one done a time line of what the Zionist were doing during this period? Also wear any Israel weapons used by North Korea or China against South Korea or our Finest?
Also I just don't belive mouse ears, will grow in to king rat and clean house in DC. General Colin Powell should have been our President for a real change.