Will Obama Be Any Better on Palestine?
It’s an open question, but I remain pessimistic. The blinkered tendency of Americans to the world through the eyes of Israel, ignoring the shocking treatment of the Palestinian people, goes far beyond partisanship. Then again, at the very least, the Obama administration will distance itself from the bloodthirsty bellicosity embodied in the neocons, a group that McCain kept very close. Or so we hope. Just take a look at the following quote:
“These people willingly send their own children to their deaths simply to make a statement — to accomplish nothing but the murder of two Israeli civilians and signal their commitment to the fight. The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.”
This is Michael Goldfarb, who worked for the McCain campaign, gleefully discussing the advantages of wiping out a person’s family. This is what we are up against, this embrace of uber-consequentialist evil, utterly denying the humanity of the Palestinians. With that premise, there are few restraints. Thus we have the deliberate sealing off of the Gaza strip (this is not a new development), the bombing of civilian areas, the refusal to allow humanitarian aid, the targeting of UN staff and installations, the ban on all foreign journalists, and the extraordinary public statement from the Red Cross to the effect that Israel “failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law” after finding a string of corpses and emaciated children lying next to their mothers.
So we might get the pure evil of Goldfarb and his ilk, but we will still not get fairness. We will still get the pro-Israel bias. One thing that made me cringe was Obama’s oft-quoted remark that he would want to do whatever it took to protect his children, if somebody was bent on sending a rocket into their bedroom. Yet again, this sees the conflict through the eyes of Israel alone. It ignores the very legitimate concerns of the Palestinians. As noted by Daniel Levy, we need to remember that Israel did not leave Gaza for altruistic reasons– it did so precisely to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and proceeded to immediately close Gaza to the outside world, making it impossible for any economic development and fostering a deeply immoral policy of collective punishment.
Levy also takes issue with the innocent-Israel-standing-alone-against-terrorism narrative that is so dominant in the United States. He is worth quoting in full here:
“We also frequently hear the claim – what would America do if it came under rocket fire from Canada or Mexico?..But let’s at least complete the analogy… Gaza constitutes under 6 percent of the ’67 territory in which a Palestinian state is supposed to be created (Gaza, West Bank, Palestinian East Jerusalem), about 94 percent remains under occupation so under our scenario 94 percent of Canada or Mexico would have remained under a 40 plus year American occupation with settlements and roadblocks, and with the “liberated” 6 percent still under siege. Now I like the Mexicans and Canadians as much as the next person but is it totally inconceivable that under such circumstances some of them would have formed hardline armed groups that would even become very popular and use that 6 percent of territory to launch attacks against America? I will leave it to your imagination.”
Remember the Israeli settlements, the subsidized and heavily fortified luxury compounds amidst Palestinian poverty. Remember the land thefts, the arbitrary barriers, the interference in the economic life of the Palestinians. Remember the daily indignities foisted on the Palestinians as they cross through daily checkpoints, often to protect the settlements. Remember the vastly inequitable distribution of water, that scarce resource in the region. Why are the Palestinian voices not heard in the United States? I think the contrast with the Russian-Georgian squabble is enlightening. The United States did not hesitate in condemning the disproportionate response from the Russians to Georgian mischief making in the majority-Russian and disputed regions within Georgia. And the response was indeed disproportionate– but no more so (and possibly less so) than Israel’s.
America, remove your blinkers! I wish Obama and his team could come to this conflict as honest brokers, adopting the position of the Vatican. If nothing else, the country would earn more respect and attract less vitriol from the Islamic world. I’ll leave the final word with Msgr. Manuel Musallam, pastor of Holy Family Parish in Gaza City:
“What you see on television cannot be compared to what is happening. The word love is choking in my throat. … We are living like animals in Gaza. We cry and nobody hears us. I am asking God for mercy and pray that the light of Christianity continues to shine in Gaza.”
I do not see how Christians can support what Israel is doing.
MM
If you are living in the US, you are probably living on land that once belonged to American Indians. Would it be appropo if in the last ten years, Indians near you fired
11,000 spears into your town…the figure for Hamas rockets into Israel in the past ten years? that is 11,000 acts of attempted murder and yet not one Palestinian on the TV air waves seems to think 11,000 attempted murders by them is anything of note.
They apparently are thank God amateur in attemtped murders…but their moral guilt remains at 11,000 attempted murders.
Last week one Sunni suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 30 Shiites with a suicide bomb which at that time was about half the people Israel had killed as collateral to their aiming at armed forces.
There were not parades of protest in the US or Europe against her killing 30 shiites….none. Which means that the protestors are not really about the killing of innocents as much as they are about railing against the Jews. When a muslim kills droves of civilians from another sect of Islam, there are zero protests in the West.
I’ve been saying Obama’s foreign policy has significant problems for Catholics for months; nice to see you starting to board that train, MM.
However, how productive is it to bring up McCain? i think you’re beating the dead horse. McCain doesn’t matter anymore; let’s focus on Obama.
And to that respect, what evidence do you have that Obama will do anything to try to mitigate the atrocities committed upon Palestinians? Perhaps Obama does not openly support the killing of Palestinian families, but what is he going to do to stop it? If nothing, I don’t see how he’s that much better than the neocons you so vehemently criticize.
As far as I’m concerned, Obama sides with the Palestinians. He has not stated outright what he would do for the Israelis (but hey they’re Jewish, right?) and he clearly subscribed to Muslim principles, all of which are inherently evil and do not contribute to Catholic thought in any way whatsoever.
I will not carry any briefs, yet, for the Obama policy on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. There IS much to be wary of, in some of his comments during the recent Presidential campaign, I grant you.
However, it has been noted, in major European media outlets, and also in some of the Middle Eastern news organisations, that one of the chief reasons that Israel chose to strike at the Gaza now, in the “interregnum” between the two Presidential Administrations, is that many of the “conservative,” “Likudnik” politicians in Israel are, themselves, extremely “worried” that Obama will attempt to revive the Oslo process and will be much more insistent that Israel start returning land and dismantling settlements. Also, what they chiefly fear, according to these sources here in Europe and in the Middle East itself, is that his Administration will take far more seriously than the Bush Administration ever did, the so-called “Arab Plan,” which is actually Saudi Arabia’s, and which would involve opening the Gaza and negotiating the status of East Jerusalem.
To change the subject slightly, and to support what MM has written here: during the time I lived in Asia, I used to read constantly, in the Asian English press, accounts of new Eastern European and Russian Jewish refugees who arrived penniless in Israel, hoping to find a quiet, peaceful region of that country to settle in, and who were forced, instead, by the various expansionist governments of that time (the 90s), to go and live in “settlements” where they became targets of Palestinian hostility. These people had no desire to be put on the front lines of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict, and they voiced, for foreign reporters, their dismay at having to, in a sense, “man the barricades” in the outposts of the ever-expanding (in absolute defiance of the Oslo Agreements) Eretz Israel.
This evening, the Guardian is reporting exactly what I anticipate—a sharp reversal of Bush Administration policies regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict, including a new willingness to talk to Hamas, at least indirectly:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/08/barack-obama-gaza-hamas
I think the Guardian has inside channels to the thinking of folks around the new President: remember that they were among the earliest accurate predictors of the appointment of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and that they refused to budge on that prediction when it was pooh-poohed by “leftists.”
And the fact that the likes of Indyk and Haass are giving the advice is all the more evidence of a sharp change in course; they are strong critics of the last eight years’ of non-involvement in mediation efforts.
If the latest signals are to be believed, Obama is now ready to soften the edges of those conditions. For those who believe that, whether we like it or not, Hamas is now part of the Palestinian reality and that no peace can ever come unless all the major players on both sides – Israeli and Palestinian – are included, this is a small, unofficial, unconfirmed but welcome move in the right direction.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/jan/08/barack-obama-gaza-hamas