PALESTINIANS LOSING FAITH IN OBAMA’S PEACE DRIVE

November 29 marks the international day of solidarity with the Palestinians. As this day nears, hope of an independent Palestinian state emerging during United States President Barack Obama’s first term in office is fast diminishing. Even Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has lost faith in the US-mediated peace process.

To mark the international day of solidarity with the Palestinians, Abbas fired out a note to the UN, expressing his disappointment with peace talks. He said: “It is time, after all of these years of negotiations that have not yielded results, for the international community, particularly the Security Council, to shoulder its responsibilities and to take immediate and decisive action that reflects the positions of the countries of the world, which have repeatedly called for the two-State solution and an end to the Israeli occupation that began in 1967, to bring an end to this conflict.”

Abbas remained an optimist though he knew the compromise after compromise he made had not gone down well with the Palestinians.

But now Abbas says he wants to quit as president of the Palestinian Authority as his faith in peace efforts has taken the Palestinians nowhere. He now moots the idea that the Palestinians should declare unilateral independence of their state within the borders that existed in 1967. It has dawned on him now that the US is not the honest broker that it is claiming to be.

He apparently feels, like many Palestinians, that President Obama lacks the power to dictate to Israel.

After the setting up of Israel in 1948, no US President had defied Israel. Some of them willingly cooperated with Israel and the America-Israeli Public Affairs Committee, the powerful Zionist lobby in the US. George W. Bush who visited West Asia with war and destruction was one of them.

There were other US Presidents who were forced to toe the Israeli line though they personally disliked pressure from the Zionist lobby. They included Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. President Jimmy Carter realized that Israel had misled him only when he became a peace activist after he lost the election to pro-Israeli Ronald Reagan.  Eisenhower had the courage to warn Britain, France and Israel during the Suez War in 1956; Kennedy had harboured a grudge against the Israeli lobby, which told him bluntly that if he wanted funds for his election campaign he should agree to leave foreign-policy making with regard to Israel and the Arab world to the lobby. Two years into his presidency, Kennedy was assassinated. Mystery shrouds his death as to why he was killed and who was behind it. In 1974, Nixon was to announce a major foreign policy shift in favour of the Arab world, but he was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal.

Like Kennedy, President Clinton also felt humiliated. During a visit to Israel as a second term president, Clinton did not like the way Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu lectured to him on what he should do.

In remarks to one of his colleagues, an angry Clinton is reported to have said: “Who the f*** does he think he is? Who’s the f***ing superpower here?”

BBC correspondent Jeremy Bowen recalled this famous Clinton quote in an article he wrote for the BBC website on Saturday. Some believe that Clinton’s Monica Lewinsky saga was a Zionist-neocon conspiracy. Even his wife, Hillary, now the US Secretary of State, said it was a rightwing plan.

Well, where does Obama fit in? Is he a President who willingly submits to Israel?

Obama the human being must be capable of seeing right from wrong. But Obama the US president has no such free will to stand by what is right. For 61 long years the Palestinians have been undergoing the humiliation of living under foreign occupation. Whatever the land that was left with them after the UN partitioned the former Ottoman province of Palestine in 1948 keeps on shrinking — with Israel expanding its illegal settlements taking more and more Palestinian land.

Obama in his Cairo speech to the Muslim world in June declared that the US wanted Israel to freeze all settlement expansions in the occupied Palestinian territories. He did mean it and made it a condition for talks with Israel. But when Netanyahu visited the United States in September, Obama was forced to eat the humble pie. He waived the condition and held extensive talks with the visiting hardline Israeli leader. Obama met Netanyahu early this month also, despite the fact that the Israeli leader had added fresh conditions to resume the peace talks. Netanyahu now insists that the Palestinians should recognize Israel as state for the Jewish people, if they want the peace talks resumed. If Abbas agrees, it would mean that 20 percent or more Arabs living in Israel will face eviction or lose their Israeli citizenship. But such a preposterous condition drew very little condemnation in Obama’s United States, Gordon Brown’s Britain, Nicolas Sarkozy’s France or Angela Merkel’s Germany.

Even when Israel began construction work for a 900-unit housing project for Jewish settlers in the occupied Jerusalem last week, only muted or skillfully regulated condemnation came out from Western capitals.

But when Israel this week agreed to halt the settlement expansion work for ten months, the US hailed the announcement as a move forward.

The Obama administration said the 10-month moratorium fell short of the complete freeze but it was an opportunity for Israel and the Palestinians to resume peace talks.

US West Asia envoy George Mitchell said that while the United States shared Arab concerns about the limitations of Israel’s gesture, it was more than any Israeli government had ever done.

The tone of the US comments exposes its bias and shows that Obama is also going the way the previous US presidents have gone – pleasing Israel, no matter how serious the crime is. The Goldstone report on Israeli war crimes in Gaza is another case in point that illustrates the Obama administration’s diehard commitment to defend Israel. Susan Rice, the United States’ UN envoy who was known for her crusade to bring Sudan to justice with regard to war crimes in Darfur, vowed to defeat any move aimed at censuring Israel on war crimes in Gaza.

There was also no condemnation or a call for probe from Obama or his Western allies when it was alleged that Israel robs organs of the Palestinians who die in custody or were killed in riots. There was also no expression of shock when the Palestinians claimed that hundreds of women who inhaled white phosphorous gas during the Gaza attack had given birth to deformed children.

The continued detention of 13,000 Palestinian prisoners without trial in Israeli prisons is another issue that the Obama administration has failed to condemn. A few hundreds of them will be released in the coming days in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been in Hamas custody since 2006.

Needless to say, the Palestinians are disappointed. They see that whenever US-Israeli talks are held what dominates is Iran’s nuclear dispute – not the Palestinian independence. This, they say, is a ruse to prolong the crisis. As the crisis drags on, Israel seizes more Palestinian land and builds more illegal settlements. This has become one of the main obstacles to Palestinians realizing their dream of state. As the Palestinian land shrinks, the West Bank will also become a Bantustan like Gaza, while Obama and his successors will continue to describe Israeli action as a move forward for Palestinian statehood.

As part of its strategy, Israel also has engineered inter-Palestinian disputes between Abbas’s Fatah movement and the Hamas administration in the Gaza Strip.

Amid this dispute, Abbas has called for presidential and legislative elections on January 24. Talks aimed at restoring Palestinian unity are also due next week in Cairo. But the Palestinian people are not optimistic. They feel that with the Obama administration sucking up to Israel and the Zionist lobby, they are once again at crossroads. They need a new strategy. But what could this strategy be? They were told to give up violence and turn to peace. But peaceful means also have not taken them to their destination.