Obama: “The best is yet to come.” Really?
When President Obama tried to get a real Middle East peace process going by calling on Israel to halt its illegal settlement activity and his “Yes, we can” became “No, we can’t”, I dared to invest some hope in the idea that in a second term he would use the leverage all presidents have to oblige Israel to end its defiance of international law and be serious about peace on terms the Palestinians could accept. And that investment was not the consequence of mere wishful thinking on my part.
There were two main reasons for my cautious optimism.
The first was (and is today even more so) in the fact that behind closed doors in Washington D.C. top military and security people are completely aware that it’s no longer in America’s own best interests to go on supporting the Zionist (not Jewish) state right or wrong.
The second was my knowledge from sources I trust that Obama has always understood that without an acceptable measure of justice for the Palestinians there could be no end to the conflict, only catastrophe for all. When he was preparing for his first run for the White House, he told a close American-Palestinian friend not to expect too much from him in his first term but to be optimistic about what he could and would do in a second term. (I took that to mean that Obama was fully aware of a fundamental truth expressed to me by former President Carter. As I have stated in previous articles, he said that any American president has only two windows of opportunity to take on the Zionist lobby, the second window being the last year of his second term – i.e. after the mid-term elections of the second term).
Today there is a third reason for cautious optimism. It was summed up in a Ha-aretz headline over an article by Akiva Eldar on 12 November – American Jews are giving up on Israel.
His opening two paragraphs were the following:
The most worrying news that came out of the U.S. presidential elections was that American Jews seem to have lost interest in Israel. Just 10 percent of American-Jewish voters said Israel was their highest priority when they went to the polls, according to a recent exit poll conducted by the pro-peace Israel lobby J Street. Nine out of 10 said domestic issues like job rates and health care were their top concerns. This is despite the fact that the Republicans and Jewish activists, many of whom are supporters of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told countless horror stories about what they described as Barack Obama’s plot to throw Israel to the Iranian wolves.
These statistics support the analysis of political commentator Peter Beinart, an associate professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, who argues that the ongoing occupation and the revelations of Israeli racism have distanced American Jews from Israel and from the Zionist idea.
And then there’s this. For a recent study two researchers from the California State University and the Hebrew Union College asked young American Jews whether they would regard Israel’s destruction as a personal tragedy. Fifty percent said they would not.
In a commentary on this finding for the Connecticut edition of the Jewish Ledger, Eric Mandel (a supporter of Israel right or wrong) asked why young American Jews do not feel connected to Israel. His answer included this:
“One explanation is that many young American Jews feel that Zionism conflicts with their liberal values. Raised on the ideal of universalism and exposed to post-nationalist ideology on campus, they cannot grasp how a nation state of and for a particular people is not racist by definition.
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