Page 1 of 2 Tearing up the US's Middle East playbook
By Tony Karon
Lest United States President Barack Obama's opportunistic silence when Israel
began the Gaza offensive that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians (more than
400 of them children) be misinterpreted, his aides pointed reporters to
comments made six months earlier in the Israeli town of Sderot. "If somebody
was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm
going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama had said in reference
to the missiles Hamas was firing from Gaza. "I would expect Israelis to do the
same thing."
Residents of Gaza might have wondered what Obama would have done had he been
unfortunate enough to be a resident of, say, Jabaliya refugee camp. What if,
like the vast majority of Gazans, his grandfather had been driven from his home
in what is now
Israel, and barred by virtue of his ethnicity from ever returning? What if,
like the majority of the residents of this refugee ghetto-by-the-sea, he had
voted for Hamas, which had vowed to fight for his rights and was not corrupt
like the Fatah strongmen with whom the Israelis and Americans liked to deal?
And what if, as a result of that vote, he had found himself under an economic
siege, whose explicit purpose was to inflict deprivation in order to force him
to reverse his democratic choice? What might a Gazan Obama have made of the
statement, soon after that election, by Dov Weissglass, a top aide to Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert, that Israel's blockade would put him and his family "on
[a] diet"?
"The Palestinians will get a lot thinner," Weissglass had chortled, "but [they]
won't die."
Starting last June, the Sderot Obama would have noticed that, as a result of a
truce brokered by Egypt, the rocket fire from Gaza had largely ceased. For the
Jabaliya Obama, however, the "Weissglass diet" remained in place. Even before
Israel's recent offensive, the Red Cross had reported that almost half the
children under two in Gaza were anemic due to their parents' inability to feed
them properly.
Who knows what the Jabaliya Obama would have made of the Hamas rockets that, in
November, once again began flying overhead toward Israel, as Hamas sought to
break the siege by creating a crisis that would lead to a new ceasefire under
better terms. He might well have had misgivings, but he would also have had
plenty of reason to hope for the success of the Hamas strategy.
Ever committed to regime change in Gaza, Israel, however, showed no interest in
a new ceasefire. As Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Fox News, "Expecting us to
have a ceasefire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a ceasefire with
al-Qaeda." (Barak apparently assumed Americans would overlook the fact that he
had, indeed, been party to just such a ceasefire since June 2008, and looks set
to be party to another now that the Gaza operation is over.)
A canny Sderot Obama would have been all too aware that Israel's leaders need
his vote in next month's elections and hope to win it by showing how tough they
can be on the Gazans. Then again, a Sderot Obama might not have been thinking
much beyond his immediate anger and fear - and would certainly have been
unlikely to try to see the regional picture through the eyes of the Jabaliya
Obama.
Nonetheless, not all Israelis were as sanguine about the Israeli offensive as
the Sderot Obama appears to have been. "What luck my parents are dead," wrote
Israeli journalist Amira Hass in Ha'aretz. Survivors of the Nazi concentration
camps, her mother and father had long hated the Orwellian twists of language in
which Israeli authorities couched their military actions against Palestinians.
My
parents despised all their everyday activities - stirring sugar into coffee,
washing the dishes, standing at a crosswalk - when in their mind's eye they
saw, based on their personal experience, the terror in the eyes of children,
the desperation of mothers who could not protect their young ones, the moment
when a huge explosion dropped a house on top of its inhabitants and a smart
bomb struck down entire families ...
Because of my parents' history they knew what it meant to close people behind
barbed-wire fences in a small area ... How lucky it is that they are not alive
to see how these incarcerated people are bombarded with all the glorious
military technology of Israel and the United States ... My parents' personal
history led them to despise the relaxed way the news anchors reported on a
curfew. How lucky they are not here and cannot hear the crowd roaring in the
coliseum.
The passions of the crowd may have been satisfied.
Or not. Certainly, Israel's three-week-long military operation appears to have
done little more than re-establish the country's "deterrent" - quantified in
the 100-1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths.
Hamas remains intact, as does the bulk of its fighting force. And if, as
appears likely, a new truce provides for a lifting, however partial, of the
economic siege of Gaza, and also for the reintegration of Hamas into the
Palestinian Authority - which would be a blunt repudiation of three years of US
and Israeli efforts - the organization will claim victory, even if the Obamas
of Jabaliya refugee camp, now possibly without homes, wonder at what cost.
If Obama is to have any positive impact on this morbid cycle of destruction and
death, he must be able to understand the experience of Jabaliya just as much as
he does the experience of Sderot. Curiously enough, he might be helped in that
endeavor by none other than the man who directed Israel's latest operation,
Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Asked by a journalist during his successful 1999
campaign for prime minister what he'd have done if he'd been born Palestinian,
Barak answered simply and bluntly: "I'd have joined a terrorist organization."
Obama's Gaza opportunity
The catastrophe in Gaza has, counterintuitively enough, presented Obama with an
opportunity to restart the peace process - precisely because it has
demonstrated the catastrophic failure of the approach adopted by the George W
Bush administration. Unfortunately, the raft of domestic and economic
challenges facing the 44th president may tempt Obama to keep many Bush foreign
policies on autopilot for now.
The plan brokered by the Bush administration in its last months for an American
withdrawal from Iraq will, for instance, probably remain largely in effect;
Obama will actually double the troop commitment to Afghanistan; and on Iran,
Obama's idea of direct talks may not prove that radical a departure from the
most recent version of the Bush approach - at least if the purpose of such
talks is simply to have US diplomats present a warmed-over version of the
carrot-and-stick ultimatums on uranium enrichment that have been on offer, via
the Europeans, for the past three years.
As Gaza has clearly demonstrated, however, continuing the Bush policy on Israel
and the Palestinians is untenable. The Bush administration may have talked of a
Palestinian state, but it had limited itself to orchestrating a series of cozy
chats between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Palestinian
counterpart, Mahmoud Abbas, aimed at creating the illusion of a "process".
There was no real process, not in the sense that the term is commonly
understood, anyway - reciprocal steps by the combatant parties to disengage and
move towards a settlement that changes political boundaries and power
arrangements. But the illusion of progress was a necessary part of the
administration's policy of dividing the Middle East on Cold War-type lines in a
supposedly epic struggle between "moderates" and "radicals".
The "moderates" included Israel, Abbas and the regimes of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi
Arabia and some of the Gulf States. The radicals were Iran, Syria, Hamas and
Hezbollah, intractable enemies of peace, democracy, and stability.
Democracy?! Yes, the chutzpah of Bush and his people was legendary - after all,
Hamas and Hezbollah had been democratically elected, which is more than you
could say for the Arab "moderates" they championed. Even Iran holds elections
more competitive than any in Egypt.
Adding to the irony, Abbas' term of office as president of the Palestinian
Authority (PA) has now expired, but you can bet your Obama inauguration
souvenir program that he won't be required by Washington to seek a new mandate
from the voters; indeed, it's doubtful that the Israelis would allow another
Palestinian election in the West Bank, which they essentially control.
Ongoing peace talks with Palestinian "moderates", no matter how fruitless,
provided important cover for Arab regimes who wanted to stand with the US and
Israel on the question of Iran's growing power and influence. But there could,
of course, be no talks with the "radicals", even if those radicals were more
representative than the "moderates". (Sure, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak stands with
Israel against Hamas, but that's because Hamas is an offshoot of Egypt's Muslim
Brotherhood, which might well trounce Mubarak if Egypt held free and fair
elections.)
Thus, Washington chose to ignore the opportunity that Hamas' historic 2006
decision to contest the Palestinian Authority legislative election offered. The
organization had previously boycotted the institutions of the PA as the
illegitimate progeny of the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the
Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which they had rejected. Caught off
guard when the Palestinian electorate then repudiated
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