Obama V Netanyahu (Shadow Boxing or A Real Contest?)
On arrival at The Carter Center with my wife I discovered that Zionism’s presidential minder system was still in place. Even out of office, Carter had to be watched and monitored. It was, in fact, Zionism’s Carter Center minder who received my wife and I. He assumed that he was going to sit in on our conversation with the former president, but as the minder was closing the door on the five of us, Carter waved him away and said with good humor: “Your presence is not necessary, Ken. We can handle this alone.” That was not, however, the last we saw of Ken. After we said goodbye to Jimmy and Rosalind, he insisted on taking us for an early dinner. His purpose was to pump me for information about what Carter had said. (One implication was that Carter’s office was not bugged).
During our conversation with the former president and first lady, Carter said that any American president had only two windows of opportunity for confronting the Zionist lobby – THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF HIS FIRST TERM and THE LAST YEAR OF HIS SECOND TERM if he had one.
Why only in the first nine months of the first term? The short answer – I knew it, Carter didn’t have to spell it out – is that from about Month 10 the fund raising for the mid-term elections starts. That’s the beginning of the period when many of those running for a seat in Congress must speak from Zionism’s script and do Zionism’s bidding if they want to guarantee the funds for their election victory and/or the delivery of organised Jewish votes in close election races… And soon after the mid-term elections are over, the fund raising for the next set of elections including the race for the White House begins.
That said I want to emphasize in passing that I do NOT blame the Zionist lobby for playing the game the way it does – using its virtually unlimited funds to buy American politicians and, when necessary, putting its awesomely effective machine to work to deliver Jewish votes. I put it this way in my book:
It is the case that at critical moments the Zionist lobby was, and is, more the maker of U.S policy for the Middle East than American Presidents and their administrations. But that is not the main point. It is that American politicians, including their Presidents, always had a choice. THEY DID NOT HAVE TO DO THE BIDDING OF THE ZIONIST LOBBY. They chose to do it to serve their own short-term interests.
Put another way, The Zionists are only playing the game, ruthlessly to be sure, by The System’s own rules. I blame most of all an American decision-making process which, because of the way election campaigns are funded and conducted, was, and still is, so open to abuse and manipulation by powerful vested interests as to be in some very important respects undemocratic.
During lecture and debating tours across America, I found myself saying on public platforms that the Zionist lobby had hi-jacked what passes for democracy; but I always added that it could not have happened without the connivance and complicity of America’s pork-barrel politicians, Democrats especially.
Back to Obama….. I am in no doubt that Carter did advise him that if he was to have even a chance of starting and advancing a real peace process, he had got to make some opening moves quickly.
As I see it, Obama’s demand for a complete stop to all Israeli settlement construction on the occupied West Bank is evidence that he not only took Carter’s advice, but that he IS serious in his commitment to work for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. As I see it, the big question is not therefore whether Obama is shadow boxing or engaged in a real contest with Netanyahu. The big question is: Will Obama be allowed to win the fight, or, will he be obliged by Congress to throw in the towel even if he is ahead on points?
(In verbal parenthesis I’ll add that whether or not a genuine and viable two-state solution is any longer possible, because of the extent of Israel’s colonisation to date, is another big question, and one we might address in our discussion).
The problem of the moment is, of course, that Netanyahu has said “No!” to Obama on the matter of ending all new settlement construction. That not only blocks any possibility of starting a real peace process, it puts Obama’s credibility with the Palestinians and the whole Arab and wider Muslim world on the line. If Netanyahu sticks to his “No”, Obama will have the choice of backing down (as almost all of his predecessors have almost always done at crunch times) or bringing real pressure to bear on Israel.
Page 4 of 7 | Previous page | Next page