By: Gideon Spiro
30 September 2011 (English translation 12 October)
What happened to Obama?
The government of Israel and the Israeli Right began the Jewish New Year, 5772, with a great deal of satisfaction. Netanyahu returned from the United Nations General Assembly as a superman who had blocked recognition of the Palestinian Authority as a state, and having “converted” the president of the United States, Barak Obama, who gave a right-wing Zionist speech, which even Israel’s Foreign Minister Lieberman endorsed wholeheartedly. And indeed, President Obama, who only recently was being called “nigger” [“kushon” – trans.] by racist settlers, became the darling of the Israeli Right by virtue of one speech at the UN. What caused the change between the Obama of last May, who spoke of the Two State Solution based on the 1967 borders (the Green Line), and the Obama of September, whose speech at the UN opposed the recognition of a Palestinian state, did not mention the 1967 borders as the basis for a solution, adopted the Likud narrative that sustains the myth of an Israel that is in danger of destruction and mentioned the right of Israeli children to live without fear of Kassams and other such things that warmed many Israeli hearts. How did it happen that the president forgot the right of Palestinian children to live without the terror of the Israeli Occupation? How can one explain why, in a speech in which he praised to the skies the struggles of Egyptians, Libyans and Tunisians for democracy, he omitted the Palestinians, who have been struggling for their freedom for nearly half a century now?
What happened to the Obama who was elected on the basis of stirring speeches about human rights and justice and who raised such great hopes among proponents of human rights all over the world, including of course Israel? Had he met with a fundamentalist Christian preacher who manipulated his feelings? Or maybe our expectations of him had been excessive from the outset? After all, this is the president of a country that gets involved in a war every few years, either directly indirectly by providing arms, and its privately-owned armaments industry is more important than all the noble principles behind the Nobel Peace Prize.
Many analysts have attributed Obama’s new membership in the parties of Netanyahu and Lieberman to an attempt not to lose the Jewish vote in next year’s presidential elections. (His membership is of course metaphorical, because in practical terms neither the Likud nor Israel Beiteinu would accept him, because he is both Black and Gentile, a combination that is utterly unacceptable to the Israeli racist Right).
If that is indeed the case, then it is a grave insult to the Jews of the United States – as if they were a bunch of idiots who vote on the basis of instructions from the Republican Netanyahu’s agents in the AIPAC lobby. Having worked as a journalist in the US and done several lecture tours there from coast to coast, my impression is different. A US president who will honestly tell Jewish voters that he is a friend of a democratic Israel but not a colonialist Israel that rules over another people, violates human rights and maintains a regime of apartheid and torture would receive widespread support among the Jewish electorate. One problem in this regard is that it is difficult for President Obama to say such things now, because he promised to close the torture facility in Guantanamo, Cuba but has not done it.
No one who listened with an open mind to the speeches of Palestinian President Abu Mazen and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at the UN General Assembly can deny the profound differences between the two. On one side Netanyahu, an arrogant colonialist, confident of absolute American support, tries to mislead his audience regarding the Occupation with words like “direct negotiations without preconditions”. This is where the fraud comes in. To Netanyahu, “without preconditions” means a continuation of the construction of settlements and pre-existing facts and conditions that render the negotiations pointless.
Netanyahu refuses to answer the question of what are the borders of the Palestinian state that he envisions, for what is the use of discussing the two-state solution when the occupying state refuses to specify its own borders? Netanyahu’s refusal is clear. From the moment that he draws the borders of the Palestinian state his charlatanism will be manifest to all: it is not a state that he has in mind, but a kind of Bantustan that cannot exist independently and is firmly in the grip of the Israeli regime.
President Abu Mazen’s speech, on the other hand, was in effect a recounting of the sufferings of the Palestinian people, of the horrors of the Occupation and the routine of the Occupation: the killing, the settlements, the humiliations, the checkpoints, the land theft, the uprooting of Palestinians’ olive trees by settlers and the army, the curfews, the demolitions of houses, the tortures, the detention camps, the burning and vandalization of mosques, the racism and the apartheid wall and roads. It was a speech that called out to the world: enough, enough, enough, let us live as a free people! But that appeal was answered with stony silence from the USA, which is supposed to be an honest broker but shamefully acted not like a powerful state but like an Israeli satellite. The Israeli tail wagged the American dog. Whoever’s heart is not closed to the appeal for human rights could not help identifying with the Palestinian victim’s longing for freedom.
Abu Mazen returned to Ramallah battered and bruised, and Netanyahu returned to Israel arrogantly. His policy is soften and “tease” his interlocutors – to gain time to continue to propel the so-called “peace process” that has been proceeding futilely for 20 years now without peace. Clearly the Palestinians are fed up. So what comes next?
If they were to ask for my opinion, I would humbly suggest to the Palestinians that they change the diskette. Cooperation with Israel has not proven effective. All coordination in the spheres of security and other things should be stopped. The Palestinian Authority – which in any case has no real control over anything, but excuses the Israeli regime from the hassle of the daily business of garbage disposal and other such things – should be dismantled. The keys should be handed over to the UN, which can then decide what to do. Meanwhile Israel can go back to being the occupying power that manages the day-to-day affairs of the occupied population. That means the allocation of more military resources, more manpower and more money that will have to be taken out of Israel’s impoverished social welfare budget.
Go back to nonviolent struggle, the main feature of which is non-cooperation with the Occupier. Set up an International Brigade like in the Spanish Civil War, but instead of weapons it will be armed with pens, paper and speech. A brigade of human rights activists composed of Palestinians, Israelis, Americans, French, Britons, Germans, Swedes, South Africans, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Ghanaians and others. There are enough people in the world who know the reality of the Occupation and will be willing to join the International Brigade.
Teams from the Brigade will cover the four corners of the Earth, meet with government ministers, parliamentarians, writers and journalists, set up colloquia, and relate orally, with slides, pictures and video clips what the Occupation looks like, what the lives of the Palestinians under Occupation are like, the military justice that converts the lives of the occupied people into hell, how they torture people in the interrogation rooms, how they put ten-year-old boys in detention camps and more about Palestinian daily life, and demand that Israel be boycotted as long as it continues to maintain the regime of Occupation and apartheid.
They will also have access to the Israeli Population Registry, which is a diskette that can easily be obtained, and from there they will take the names of Israeli citizens who live beyond the Green Line, transmit them to the governments of the world and ask them not to honour their Israeli passports as long as they are parties to a war crime, as the settlements are defined in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In the end the Occupation will fall like the Apartheid regime in South Africa fell. You need restraint, patience and perseverance.
Translated from Hebrew for Occupation Magazine by George Malent.
gm
|
