Obama V Netanyahu (Shadow Boxing or A Real Contest?)
How Netanyahu will play his hand from here on is not difficult to imagine. He will seek to avoid a major confrontation with Obama by dragging out settlement construction discussions for another three or four months. In doing that he’ll be acting on the assumption that if he can get to September or October without real pressure from Obama, the start of the fund raising for America’s next mid-term elections will put the Zionist lobby firmly in the driving seat, firmly enough to prevent Obama putting real pressure on Israel.
On the face of it, and if American politics follow their traditional course, Obama has only a few more months of his first term to put real pressure on Israel if that is what he wants to do.
That’s a reasonable assessment but it assumes that in September and October and thereafter, the Zionist lobby will still be as awesomely powerful as it has been for many years past. Will that necessarily be so? It’s possible to make a case for saying perhaps not.
President Obama is not only the first American President to fully understand the real dynamics of the making and sustaining of this conflict, and to be sensitive to the real concerns and needs of both Jews and Arabs (and other Muslims). He also knows that if he is to have more influence on Congress than the Zionist lobby at crunch times, he’s got to create a constituency of understanding – meaning that he’s got to see to it that more and more Americans are informed about who must do what and why for justice and peace in the Middle East. Put another way, Obama knows that the more Americans are informed, the less their elected representatives will be able to do Zionism’s bidding when doing it is not in American’s own best interests.
There was one particular passage in Obama’s Cairo speech that was intended to be a wake-up call to all of his fellow Americans, a presidential plea for them to open their eyes to what is really happening on the ground in Israel/Palestine. It was the passage in which he spoke, powerfully and with feeling, about the “humiliations” the Palestinians suffer on a daily basis as the consequence of “occupation”. Arabs and other Muslims everywhere didn’t need to be told that. But for many and probably most Americans, the notion of the Palestinians being under Israeli occupation would have been something of a revelation. (I ought to be exaggerating to make a point, but I’m not. Many Americans have no idea about what has happened in Palestine).
With the mainstream American media still preferring to peddle Zionism’s propaganda assertions without challenge, there are obviously limits to how far Obama himself can go in opening the eyes of his fellow Americans to who must do what and why if hope for peace on terms virtually all Palestinians and most Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept is not to be abandoned. But there are no limits to what others could do.
In my view one of the tragedies of the present is that the Arab regimes are not doing what they so easily could do to help create in America the constituency of understanding that would greatly improve Obama’s prospects of having more influence on Congress than the Zionist lobby at crunch time.
As some of us but sadly not many Americans know, there is a Saudi-inspired Arab peace plan on the table. And it’s been there since March 2002 when it was approved by the Council of Arab States at a summit meeting in Beirut.
In return for a full Israeli withdrawal from all Arab territory occupied in the war of 1967, and Israel’s acceptance of the establishment of a sovereign, independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem its capital, Israel is offered a comprehensive and full and final peace and the complete normalisation of relations with the Arab world. As the text of the peace plan puts it, the Arab countries would “consider the Arab-Israeli conflict ended”.
In fairness it has to be said that without clarification there is one point in the text of the Arab peace plan that makes it unacceptable to most Israelis and possibly/probably many other Jews. It’s the paragraph that reads as follows:
Achievement of a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem to be agreed upon in accordance with UN General Assembly Resolution 194.
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