What do Obama and Abbas have in common?
To give a concrete plan real meaning Obama would have to indicate when he presented it that if Israel remained committed to defying international law and UN Security Council resolutions, the U.S. would have no choice but to use the leverage it has to cause (or try to cause) Israel to be serious about peace on terms that would provide justice for the Palestinians and security for all.
Such an approach would require Obama to say in public what President Kennedy said to Golda Meir in a private conversation with her in Florida two days before his last Christmas. Kennedy defined what he called the “limitations” of America’s relationship with Israel, a relationship, he said, that was “a two-way street.” (The story of JFK’s secret conversation with Golda, much of what was said is still classified, is contained in Turning Point – The Assassination of President Kennedy, Chapter 11 of Volume Two of my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, which is sub-titled David Becomes Goliath. If Kennedy had been allowed to live, he was intending in a second term to require Israel to be serious about peace. After his assassination America’s relationship with Israel became what it still is – a one-way street).
In my view Abbas as hero would go much further than saying there will be no point in meeting with Obama if he is not coming with a concrete plan to get a real peace process going and a commitment to do whatever is necessary to make it work.
Abbas would also say that if the coming days proved that there’s nothing of real substance to negotiate about because Israel’s leaders are not interested in peace on terms the Palestinians could accept, and can’t be stopped from continuing the colonization of the occupied West bank (on-going ethnic cleansing slowly and by stealth), there would be no point in the continued existence of the Palestine National Authority, and it will be dissolved, handing full responsibility and accountability for the occupation back to Israel.
There is no reason to believe that Abbas will end his grovelling to Obama. (In Daud Abdullah’s account of why the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation and unity talks are going nowhere, there was a secret meeting in Ramallah between the US ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, and Abbas and other PLO leaders, Shapiro requested that they “freeze the reconciliation talks until after President Obama’s visit to the region.” Abbas, Daud Abdullah noted, “dutifully complied”).
But what if Abbas did end his grovelling by putting Obama on notice that there would be no point in the two of them meeting if the president was not coming with the commitment to get a real peace process going, AND that a continuation of the status quo would result in the dissolution of the PNA – would that be enough to cause Obama to think seriously about ending his grovelling to the Zionist lobby and its neo-con and Christian fundamentalist allies…?
In my view that’s an interesting question. While I think about possible answers to it, I find myself wondering if Abbas would be assassinated if he ended his grovelling to America, and if President Obama would suffer the same fate as JFK if he ended his grovelling to the Zionist lobby and its allies.
A Request
Could somebody solve a New York Times mystery for me?
The electronic edition of this newspaper still arrives in my in-box every day and I can view the menu of its content, but for the last few days I have been unable to open/access any of its reports, op-ed pieces and editorials.
As my regular readers know, I quite often quote the NYT in articles I write. (I also tweet them). In the two or three weeks before it became impossible for me to open/access the paper’s content, I quoted several pieces including an editorial that were to some degree critical of Israel.
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