Never before has an American President’s fear of offending the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress been so exposed as it was by Obama’s decision to veto the Security Council resolution condemning continued, illegal Israeli settlement activities on the occupied West Bank and demanding that Israel “immediately and completely cease” all such activities. In a different America – an informed America – some might think, I do, that Obama should be impeached. The charge? TREASON.
After she had exercised the Obama administration’s first veto, the plea made by U.S. Ambassador Susan Rice for understanding of America’s position could not have been more absurd. “Our opposition to the resolution before this Council today should not be misunderstood to mean that we support settlement activity. On the contrary, we reject in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity.”
So why the veto? Ambassador Rice said:
“The United States has been deeply committed to pursuing a comprehensive and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, In that context, we have been focused on taking steps that advance the goal of two states living side by side in peace and security, rather than complicating it. That includes a commitment to work in good faith with all parties to underscore our opposition to continued settlements.”
What nonsense! If the Obama administration really wanted to underscore its stated opposition to Israel’s on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem, there was no better or more effective way of doing so than voting for the resolution or abstaining. In either case the resolution would have passed and that would have opened the door to real global pressure on Israel if it continued to defy international law.
As for advancing the goal of a two-state solution, the Obama administration has done the opposite. By allowing Israel to continue its illegal settlement activities and consolidate its occupation, it, the Obama administration, has helped to guarantee that there can never be a viable Palestinian state living side by side with an Israel inside its borders as they were on the eve of the 1967 war.
In the context of the conflict in and over Palestine that became Israel, the only thing to which the Obama administration has been deeply committed is not provoking the wrath of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress and the mainstream media. For all practical purposes Obama has surrendered policy making on Israel-Palestine to this lobby. (The veto marked the complete surrender).
The essence of the problem this presents can be simply stated. The Zionist lobby’s agenda – unquestioning support for Israel right or wrong – is not in America’s own best interests. (In reality it is not in anybody’s best interests including those of Israeli Jews and the Jews of the world).
As I pointed out on I February in my post Crunch time coming for America in the Middle East?, what all Arab peoples want is not only an end to corruption and repression and a better life in their own countries. They also want an end to the humiliation caused by Israel’s arrogance of power and American support for it.
It is clear that the manifestations of Arab people power the world is witnessing were not instigated by Islamist extremist groups and are spontaneous protests with demands by citizens from all sections of civil society. So at the present time that is no evidence to suggest that change brought about by people power in Arab states will create more cover, more scope and more popular support for extremist and violent forces which use and abuse Islam in much the same way as Zionists use and abuse Judaism. But this could change, in my view will change, if America goes on supporting Israel right or wrong. In other words, the more the administration in Washington D.C. is perceived by the Arab street as being complicit in the Zionist state’s defiance of international law and crimes, the more American interests and citizens are likely to be targeted and hit.
The American Constitution states that a president can be impeached and removed from office for “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanours.”
In my view a president who allows a lobby group to put the interests of a foreign power above those of the country of which they are citizens, and who by doing so puts his fellow citizens more in harm’s way than they otherwise would be, is guilty of treason. (And all the more so when the American-Jewish lobby in question does not speak for more than about a third, and possibly only a quarter, of America’s mainly silent and deeply troubled Jews)
Footnote:
The admirable and courageous Gideon Levy, the conscience of Israeli journalism, has a brilliant article (which I have tweeted) in today’s Ha’aretz with the headline With settlement veto resolution, Obama has joined Likud.
And this is how Gideon concluded his piece:
“If the U.S. had been a responsible superpower, it would have voted for the resolution on Friday to rouse Israel from its dangerous sleep. Instead, we got a hostile veto from Washington, shouts of joy from Jerusalem and a party that will end very badly for both.”
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So, the only thing which changed after the American elections, was the name of the President. Policy is still dictated by those with the real power, the money men. It would be nice to see a list of their names so that the people of America can see who really rules the roost.
Maybe the real aim of the US zionist policy after all is to make sure that the pariah state of Israel be destroyed, that this is the real true goal of christian zionists, who knows? And what better policy then that supporting at all costs all the insane actions of the mad dog Israel. In a way that could be it because whi is insane enough to not see that the two states solution is dead and buried and consequently the ONLY SOLUTION LEFT IS A PALESTIAN STATE!
Well done Obama well done America!
US foreign policy is conducted in a forked tongue. Things said are much different from things done, that's the US way for a long time.
Obama after he was elected, had the whole world in the palm of his hand. Unfortunately soon after the real Obama emerged, and his true color showed. He was in big business pocket and Israeli lobby dictated his every move and decision. America has lost any credibility it had when Obama was elected, now US is viewed as a paper tiger on an Israeli short leach, unless and until this policy is changed quickly and dramatically, rule of the jungle will prevail and freedom lost bit by bit all over the world.
Obama is so obsessed with being re-elected that I'm sure he's got AIPAC on the brain, not realizing that this faux pas is going to come back and haunt him, especially now that the Arab world is in flux. By the way, Alan, you were spot on, you predicted this would happen. Instead of working with the new realities on the ground in the middle east, Obama is trying to maintain the status quo. There is no way he is convincing anyone that his intentions were to preserve the dead-as-a-doornail "peace process." It's clear that his motives were not so honorable.
Hopefully the two state solution is dead. In my opinion it would never have worked,there isn't enough space for two people in such a small country, there would be constant friction and disagreement over resources.
Now I can see a way opening up for the the Palestinians to finally get back their country, unless the Israeli's manage to ethnically cleanse them first,world pressure and sanctions will eventually prevail.
So what else is new?
All of your analyses are very convincing. To reach a wider audience you need to modify some of your vocabulary. As a first step how about substituting the word "spokesman" for "stooge"?
It was clear to me from the start that Obama would not do anything progressive when he was elected to office. The Democratic Party is financed by the banks, big business and the special interest lobbies like AIPAC. The Democratic Party is, to use a Marxist term, a thoroughly bourgeois party. No one gets anywhere near the office of President in the Democratic Party unless they first surrender any progressive principles they might have to the interests of the military-financial-industrial complex.
Arab-American presidential candidate Ralph Nader understands this. On the night that Obama was elected, Nader was being interviewed on TV and he pointed at pictures of a triumphant Obama on a TV monitor and commented: "This isn't politics. It's show business". I thought it was a very good way of describing US presidential elections.
The election process is a farce from start to finish. Candidates are marketed as TV celebrities. Elections are a gloried "America has talent" show where the most personable, celebrity-like candidate wins. The debates are phoney, stage-managed affairs in which the limits of what may be said are defined by the big money interests that finance their campaigns.
Obama's grovelling, unambiguously supportive statements to AIPAC during the election campaign made it clear from the outset that he would do nothing to challenge the Zionist state. Israel is, after all, the launchpad for the American Empire in the Middle East and is, in a very real sense, the 52nd state of the US (the UK is the 51st). In the eyes of the US, The Palestinians have approximately the same status and fate as the native Americans in 19th Century America.
Obama can certainly talk the talk and make a very fine speech. Unlike "Dubya", he is an intelligent and articulate intellectual. And being a black person he has experienced--and continues to experience--white racism during his lifetime. It might be expected that this would enable him to empathise with the Palestinians and indeed his comments on the the Egyptian revolution drew parallels between Tahrir Square and the US civil rights movement. But it is not what he says that matters but what he does.
At the very same time that he said that he supported the Egyptian revolution, he was continuing to bankroll the Egyptian military that will crush it at the first opportunity. Our only hope lies in the possibility that the revolutions that are currently sweeping the Middle East will spread to the youth of Palestine and inspire them to overthrow the sell-out, Quisling Fatah regime and replace it with a new secular, democratic leadership. Such a revolutionary secular Palestinian leadership would be able to undermine the Zionist's ability to use Islamophobic fear-mongering to maintain the Israeli Jewish population in a permanent state of chauvinistic frenzy.
How could this be achieved? I think that a Palestinian revolution--like all the other Middle Eastern revolutions--should be using as its spearhead the demand for a constituent assembly. In Palestine it should be open to all Palestinians (including Palestinian Jews who accept the legitimacy of such an assembly) in all parts of Palestine: the West Bank, Gaza and Israel itself. Its primary purpose would be to draw up a new democratic constitution for the whole of Palestine and elect a new Palestinian government--in exile if necessary. The successful precedent set by the Irish Dail during the 1920s War of Independence comes to mind.
The revolutions in the Middle East have revealed a new generation of clued-up Arab and Iranian youth who are plugged into the rest of the world via the Internet. We see here the famous demonstration effect that was in evidence during the Cold War when East Germans could watch West German TV and see how much more wealthy the live styles of the West German middle classes were (subsidised by the US). Today's Arab youth want the same things as everyone else--democratic rights, the right to be free from fear, the ending of vast inequalities in wealth, an end to corruption, the right to assembly, unrestricted use of the Internet, a reasonable standard of living, quality public services and a welfare net.
The revolutions have shown that Arabs are not the homogeneously Islamic fundamentalist caricature that has been painted by the West, but are--like the Christian West--a heterogeneous population with a whole spectrum of religious and non-religious views. Only about 40% of the people in Tahrir Square were participating in the prayers according to some reports. This revelation is important in disarming the Western and Zionist Islamophobic fear-mongering project. The Arab youth need to capitalise on it.
The objective of the demand for a constituent assembly should be to demonstrate to Palestinian Jews (we should not call them Israelis) that they have nothing to fear from their Arab neighbours, that they are welcome to participate in a common revolutionary democratic framework which aims to rid the land of corruption, colonial arrogance, vast inequalities in wealth and the European racism towards Arabs that too many Jews brought with them when they came to Palestine. Such an assembly should be open to ALL parties--including HAMAS.
There will probably always be an Islamic component in any Middle Eastern democratic assembly. The recent revolts have show, however, that today's Arab and Iranian youth are motivated not by Islamic fundamentalism but by the desires of youth everywhere: for social justice, freedom of expression and the cleansing of their societies of greed and corruption. Turkey shows that it is possible for a predominately Muslim people to live in a secular, democratic political framework. Every time the Zionist fear-mongers warn about Egypt becoming another Iran, we should remind them about Turkey (and about the Iranian revolution that is to come).
The two state solution has always been dead - Israel never had any intentions of allowing the Palestinians to have their own state. This is why the whole "peace process" was nothing but a dog and pony show, while in the background the Israelis continued to oppress and kill Palestinians and steal their land and water.
Obama showed his true colors well before he was elected. You can still find his infamous groveling appearance at the AIPAC convention in 2008 on YouTube. In that speech, he promised the Zionists they could have Jerusalem, undivided, and also swore undying fealty to the Zionist cause. I feel Obama was elected because of the economic crash - and John McCain and Sarah Palin were just too damn frightening.
Bravo to Chris Edwards (above) for his fine summing up of the Israel/Palestine situation and the causes and possible outcome of the uprisings across the Middle East and No. Africa. One of the best things I've read of late. One has to both grieve and rejoice, and hope that all ends well.
When I voted for Obama, I thought I was voting for a new era of American foreign policy, with human rights for all being at the top of the list. I cannot express my dismay strongly enough. Obama has not only let us down, he is indeed a tool of the Zionist enterprise. Is there no one with the guts to stand up to Israel and DO THE RIGHT THING????
[...] According to Alan Hart, a former BBC presenter and a former Middle East Chief Correspondent for Britain’s Independent Television News, President Barack Obama should be impeached and tried for treason. On Friday February 18, 2011, President Obama authorized a veto on a resolution in the United Nations Security Council that condemned Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as illegal, and demanded that such constructions be stopped. Every member of the Security Council except the United States backed the resolution. Hart writes: [...]
First make Obama return the ill-deserved Nobel Prize and the money. Then! go ahead and impeach him and his councilors.
[...] stopped. Every member of the Security Council except the United States backed the resolution. Hart writes: Never before has an American President’s fear of offending the Zionist lobby and its stooges [...]
Your bloved Arab dictators are at it again butchering left to right...I have an idea lets talk about Israel lol
Democracy requires participation from its citizens. Unfortunately, Americans and others living under democracy are too lazy to participate in it. This is why their rights are slipping through their fingers.
Seeing the tremendous energy and courage these young revolutionaries have shown, I think they have more than enough dedication to create a truly successful democracy.
If they have the will Mary. I hope they do, I'd like to see before I die, somewhere in the world, a democratic state, run by the people of that state. But, once politicians have been bought by the big money, it doesn't exist. Money = power in this world. It's taken me sixty plus years to learn that, I lived in ignorance until it dawned on me,there are many wiser people out there who have known for a long time, but kept us slaves ignorant. I love the internet : )
Politicians can only be bought when there is inadequate oversight - and it is up to the people to remain vigilant unless they're willing to give their democracy away. When there are free elections, the people have the power to toss out the politicians who are not doing what the people elected them to do.
Merely whining about governmental failures isn't enough. There is still power in the vote, if people would only use it. Only about 30 percent of the total electorate in the US actually bothers to do so. So what right do people have to complain?