Obama: Speechless in Gaza
Ed Note: See comments below to follow developments.
A good piece by an Egyptian writer — Alaa Al Aswany, author of the 2007 novel Chicago — in the Times: “Why the Muslim World Can’t Hear Obama.”
He writes:
“We saw Mr. Obama as a symbol of this justice. We welcomed him with almost total enthusiasm until he underwent his first real test: Gaza. Even before he officially took office, we expected him to take a stand against Israel’s war on Gaza. We still hope that he will condemn, if only with simple words, this massacre that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, many of them civilians. (I don’t know what you call it in other languages, but in Egypt we call this a massacre.)
“We expected him to address the reports that the Israeli military illegally used white phosphorus against the people of Gaza. We also wanted Mr. Obama, who studied law and political science at the greatest American universities, to recognize what we see as a simple, essential truth: the right of people in an occupied territory to resist military occupation.
“But Mr. Obama has been silent. So his brilliantly written Inaugural Speech did not leave a big impression on Egyptians. We had already begun to tune out.
“We were beginning to recognize how far the distance is between the great American values that Mr. Obama embodies, and what can actually be accomplished in a country where support for Israel seems to transcend human rights and international law.”
The new president, as a wet-behind-the-ears senator in 2006, loudly supported Israel’s attack on Lebanon. This, recall, was sold as an attack on the Army of God (Hezballah), but in fact on its first day destroyed the power plant supplying Beirut, and within days had destroyed every bridge into Beirut.
It was an attack on the heart of the new Lebanon, which has been spiralling back toward the chaos of 70s and 80s since, after years of painful but productive rebuilding.
The assault on Gaza City has been similarly sold and miscast in the press as an attack on terrorists. Over a thousand people have been killed, and it seems the Likud under Benjamin Netanyahu will now carry the Israeli elections next week — and that the even farther-right party of Avigdor Lieberman will overtake the leading Leftist party (Labor) in the Knesset, on a tide of youthful Israeli pride.
This attack on Gaza comes at the end of a policy pursued from day one of Bush-Cheney that has (i) undermined the centrist Fatah Palestinian party, leaving Hamas in the driver’s seat, (ii) junked the notion of curbing West Bank settlement (Netanyahu is pledging more) and (iii) shed a new generation of blood that leaves a permanent political solution again a distant dream.
A friend who follows these matters suggests that the militant Israeli right considers it a condition of Israel’s existence not only that the lands conquered in 1967 be permanently possessed, but also that an Arab democracy — a self-sustaining state that the US would support — never takes shape in the Levant. Hence the attacks on Beirut and Gaza City.
The new US administration’s plate is certainly full, and Obama’s words and acts so far in general re the mideast have been positive.
But is his silence on Gaza the significant detail that tells?
Dunno. For now, his silence here gets thrown into the basket of all the other odd, unproductive and anti-political things he has done and not done since taking office.
Maybe he just wants Israelis and Palestinians to be friends. And considers their bickering one of those “childish things” that he urged us all to leave behind during his inaugural address.
Maybe he truly is above politics, and, like Silent Cal Coolidge, will wind up doing pretty much nothing in the White House.
ed says:
It seems that Livni, the Kadima candidate, has closed the gap with Likud/Netanyahu in the past five days and is within striking distance again.
But this watcher at the Guardian seems to think there’s not much difference between her and Netanyahu. ??
February 9th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
ed says:
Here’s Livni (the centrist Kadima leader) explaining that Israeli Joe Six-Packs have shifted to the Right.
February 10th, 2009 at 1:55 am
ed says:
And aha — there seems indeed to have been a late swing back away from Netanyahu:
Exit polls reported by Guardian say Kadima will have two more seats than Likud.
February 10th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Drew says:
I’m glad to see you address the assault on Gaza and, as I’d have expected, your commentary (along with that of the Egyptian writer) is an excellent summary of that atrocity, how it is inextricably tethered to the Israeli election, and the despair-inducing implications for the future.
Speaking for myself, in the aftermath of the three-week assault on one and a half million civilians — whose status as humans is not recognized in the establishment media of the U.S. — pretty much canceled out any interest I’d had in the inauguration festivities.
February 10th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
ed says:
Drew: Me too. Don’t wanna hear it. Lost all my picnic spirit.
Across the range of policy — botching things Right and Left with Congress on the stimulus bill, caving in to Geithner’s Paulson II plan, this Looking-Away-From (“repression of”) Gaza, and handing foreign policy in general to the generals having long ago signed off on whatever misadventure they’ve got planned for Pakghanistan — Obama’s emptiness and inaction so far are shocking.
Is he an ingenue?
Can it be true?
Just doesn’t know what to do?
February 10th, 2009 at 7:49 pm
ed says:
It seems the Israeli results are:
Kadima/Livni – 28 seats
Likud/Netanyahu – 27
Israel Home/Lieberman (far right) – 15
Labor/Barak – 13
They’ll be fighting for a while as to who should be prime minister.
February 10th, 2009 at 11:37 pm
ed says:
Interesting too to recall the angry exchange between the Israeli president Peres and the Turkish prime minister Erdogan at Davos.
They were were on panel together, discussing world affairs. Peres spoke for 25 minutes, stridently defending the Gaza attack, and apparently in a brief exchange thereafter he and Erdogan offended each other.
Erdogan then tried to reply with some substance to Peres’s argument — and the Wall Street Journal moderator cut Erdogan off, explaining that they had to go to lunch.
Erdogan overrode the moderator for a minute or two, telling Peres what he thought, then left.
The video belies the American press coverage, which pictured Erdogan as raving. Obviously he was not.
And received a very warm welcome back in Turkey.
Turkey of course is a major US ally, too. And a NATO cornerstone.
February 11th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
ed says:
Meanwhile, across the pond, an Arab in the government (community affairs) is pilloried for forwarding an email listing websites that (according to the email’s author) had been:
“developed by Jews who intentionally are spreading wrong information about the Qur’an, the hadith [sayings of Muhammad] and Islam itself.”
???
Speechless in Gaza, indeed …
Soon enough I suppose we’ll stop using human languages altogether, grunts and the like more than sufficient for life on the Animal Farm.
February 14th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
ed says:
An interesting set of snapshots in the ongoing war (in good part for the heart & mind of Uncle Sam) between Europe and Israel:
– In late 2005, the European Union shelves a report about Israeli de facto annexation of Palestinian property in East Jerusalem, to avoid antagonizing both Israel and Washington.
– Now, in late 2008, an updated report re same finally sees light of day.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:34 pm
ed says:
Hillary announces that Obama will visit Turkey in a few weeks.
Here is a less-than-impressed review of her tour thru the mideast.
The conclusion is the increasingly familiar disappointement with Obama’s bland stand so far.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
ed says:
Britain will open talks with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Another move in the ongoing struggle between Europe and Israel (see penultimate comment above). Not that Britain IS Europe, but, here, seems to be leading a policy turn with tacit support on the Continent.
The piece by Roger Cohen (linked here) is worth reading. In fact, here’s the back half:
QUOTE
One view of Israel’s continued expansion of settlements, Gaza blockade, West Bank walling-in and wanton recourse to high-tech force would be that it’s designed precisely to bludgeon, undermine and humiliate the Palestinian people until their dreams of statehood and dignity evaporate.
The argument over recognition is in the end a form of evasion designed to perpetuate the conflict.
Israel, from the time of Ben Gurion, built its state by creating facts on the ground, not through semantics. Many of its leaders, including Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, have been on wondrous political odysseys from absolutist rejection of division of the land to acceptance of a two-state solution. Yet they try to paint Hamas as irrevocably absolutist. Why should Arabs be any less pragmatic than Jews?
Of course it’s desirable that Hamas recognize Israel before negotiations. But is it essential? No. What is essential is that it renounces violence, in tandem with Israel, and the inculcation of hatred that feeds the violence.
Speaking of violence, it’s worth recalling what Israel did in Gaza in response to sporadic Hamas rockets. It killed upward of 1,300 people, many of them women and children; caused damage estimated at $1.9 billion; and destroyed thousands of Gaza homes. It continues a radicalizing blockade on 1.5 million people squeezed into a narrow strip of land.
At this vast human, material and moral price, Israel achieved almost nothing beyond damage to its image throughout the world. Israel has the right to hit back when attacked, but any response should be proportional and governed by sober political calculation. The Gaza war was a travesty; I have never previously felt so shamed by Israel’s actions.
No wonder Hamas and Hezbollah are seen throughout the Arab world as legitimate resistance movements.
END QUOTE
I’ve been thinking for some time (some months) now that wide-ranging major war is in the books as a reaction to the financial catastrophe.
The world has been falling in love with the idea of war the entire decade, led by Bush-Cheney, as Japan and Germany led 100 (sic) years ago.
Simultaneously, as 100 years ago, the world has been falling in love with machines, machines based on semiconductors this time, rather than internal combustion engines. A neo-Futurism defines the Zeitgeist again; people spend more time with their computers than their lovers, and all chips are on Technology to lead us out of the disasters that Technology has birthed.
Re the march to war, Obama has yet to show any signs of Change. From high finance to the National Security Apparat, he seems so far the Establisment’s boy, or “Tom,” as Ralph Nader put it so blatantly last year. Perhaps Ralph knew of whom he spoke; we shall see, eventually.
Might world-scale war come? We’re actually not far from it at the moment, when one considers the Americans at work on both sides of Iran.
When we downsize in Iraq the future there — the Iran-Iraq future — will begin to assert itself. It’s very hard to see Washington and Tehran each agreeing to Leave Iraq Alone.
That is: Our invasion of Iraq and the Pentagon’s construction of 13 (is that number still on target?) permanent bases, has made Iraq a permanent battlefield. At best, a No Man’s Land like that which divided the German forces from the allies in the first war. At worst … the first war in full bloom.
On the eastern border … Will Russia and China sit by as we venture into Pakistan? Perhaps they will — and then watch us spin wheels and burn soldiers and treasure, smiling like Cheshire cats.
But even assuming (I don’t) all goes well with what Gates and Mullen have planned for Pakghanistan, what then?  The vise Iran finds itself in will be intolerable. And neither Russia nor China could tolerate an American move on Iran.
Anyway … Larger war in Pakghanistan is in the cards — the Yankees are Coming as we breathe — and it seems it cannot get much larger without involving the other major powers (by proxy).
In that world — on fire from Iraq to … Indonesia (?), who would cry if Tel Aviv one morning went up in the mushroom cloud of some misplaced SU or US ordinance? (Mother Jones reports that the US has lost at least ten nuclear devices, and stories of leaks out of the Soviet system in the early 90s were of substance.) Britain’s move to open talks with Hezbollah speaks volumes. Israel has lost all its friends in this world, aside from Uncle Sam. And Sam ain’t what he used to be.
March 9th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
ed says:
Charles Freeman, a signal critic of the Israeli militancy, nominated by Dennis Blair (DNI) to chair the new-tangled National Intelligence Council, gets axed by the Likud Lobby.
Freeman, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was also (more broadly) a vocal critic of the Iraq War and, in general, Bush-Cheney’s War on Terror.
The more things Change in the Obamarama the more they stay the same.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
ed says:
US intel rejects last week’s Israeli claim that Iran has crossed a dangerous “highly enriched uranium” threshold.
A very similar thing happened, of course, shortly after Rumsfeld was dismissed at the Pentagon.
March 11th, 2009 at 9:58 am
ed says:
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Netanyahu names Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister. Thus, the Israeli constellation is as militarist and fascistic as possible in the wake of the balanced election result.
March 16th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
ed says:
The Times too observes that Israel has lost all its friends in the world.
Meanwhile Moshe Katsav, who resigned as President of Israel in 2007, has been indicted for rape.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:57 am
ed says:
And now testimony of Israeli soldiers about the wanton murder of civilians during the Gaza assault …
And more.
March 19th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
ed says:
An Israeli view of the first day of the new government.
April 4th, 2009 at 10:15 pm
ed says:
The Times this Sunday prints an Op Ed accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza. Pretty strong.
More photos re/from same.
April 4th, 2009 at 10:19 pm
ed says:
REMISS not to have noted that Obama, with his speech in Cairo, has addressed a lot of the complaints aired in the piece posted above.
There is no exaggerating the worth and reach of the Cairo speech. Hats off.
It remains for Obama to somehow apply it to American foreign policy, which remains as fully in the hands of the National Security Apparat as it has been since World War II.
Most pressingly: The adventure in Pakghanistan (born of baby Bush whismy to do something for Unocal in its dispute with Bridas over the proposed Afghan pipeline) is clearly swirling down the toilet. Get the heck out of there.
July 24th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
ed says:
A good Op Ed piece that paints the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11malley.html
This well founded despair feeds the notion that the final solution will come in regionwide upheaval, and will be as violent and mass murderous as what the world went thru in the ’40s.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:56 pm