Obama V Netanyahu (Shadow Boxing or A Real Contest?)
Now let’s fast forward to today. There are signs that a small but growing number of Americans, including some in Congress, are not only sick and tired of Israel’s demands, but are understanding that support for Israel right or wrong is not in America’s own best interests. If this shift in American public opinion develops and hardens, it will obviously assist President Obama IF his commitment to work for the establishment of a viable Palestinian state is real.
Is it? Is Obama prepared to have a real fight with Netanyahu and all he represents and, if necessary, deliver a knock-out blow, or is he, Obama, only shadow boxing in the hope that such a play, together with his appealing rhetoric, will be enough to improve America’s image in the Arab and wider Muslim world?
When Obama entered the White House I was not optimistic about the prospects for real change in America’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. My initial thinking on what could really be expected from him with regard to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was conditioned in part by Rashid Khalidi’s assessment. In the closing months of the race for the White House, his reading of his friend led him to say in private that we should “not expect anything of significance from President Obama in his first term.” I recalled those words when President-elect Obama maintained a shameful silence during Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. In my view that offensive was a most shocking and awesome demonstration of Israeli state terrorism, war crimes and all.
And then, soon after Obama had settled into the White House, there were indications that he was intending to change America’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to do so without too much delay.
The first indication was his appointment of George Mitchell as his special envoy to the Middle East. (I took that appointment to mean that President Obama was not confident that he could rely on inputs from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton because she might be too much under the influence of the Zionist lobby. I now think Hillary had a sense of Obama’s concerns, and that explains why, to date, she has reinforced Obama’s positions which are not to the liking of Zionism’s hawks in Israel and their lobby in America. And that in turn explains why Hillary is now being attacked, verbally, by the lobby).
The second indication was, of course, Obama’s demand that Israel stop all new settlement construction on the occupied West Bank, including what the Israelis disingenuously call “natural growth”.
Now… If Rashid Khalidi’s assessment of what could be expected of President Obama was correct at the time it made it, something changed to cause the new president to risk an early confrontation with Zionism. What could that something have been?
My guess is that in-coming President Obama took former President Carter’s advice. I’ll now tell you why I think I know what that advice was.
Shortly after Jimmy Carter ceased to be president, I was invited to meet with him at The Carter Center in Atlanta. The message from his intermediary invited me to bring my wife because Jimmy and Rosalind worked as a team. Jimmy was aware that I had been the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres, then the leader of Israel’s main opposition Labour Party and who was hoping to win Israel’s next election and deny Begin a second term as prime minister. Carter wanted me to brief him on my mission and, more generally, to add to his knowledge of reality on the Palestinian side. (Incidentally, the full, inside story of my shuttle between Arafat and Peres is told in The Blood Oath, Chapter 35 of Volume Two of the UK hardback edition of my book. Some copies of it are available here tonight at a significant discount price).
One of the many revelations in my book is that every American President has to put up with the presence in his White House inner circle of a Zionist minder. The minder’s job is to keep the Zionist lobby informed of any policy initiatives the president might be planning which would not be to Zionism’s liking. That gives the lobby the necessary lead time to organise its stooges in Congress to block the president, or at least to make life very, very difficult for him.
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