Obama and Palestine
PRESIDENT Barack Obama consistently disappoints those who expected him to depart fundamentally from the policies of George W. Bush. Whether it is regime change (Libya) or the Guantanamo torture camp, the policies remain the same, for two reasons. He shares the national outlook and the prejudices that go with it. Besides, he needs to win acceptance.
Anyone who imagined that his muchtouted Cairo speech was a prelude to change, must be disillusioned after the four days (May 19-22) during which he capitulated to the hard-line prime minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu.
Just before boarding a plane to Washington, D.C. on May 19, Netanyahu said that he expected “to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of American commitments made to Israel”.
This was a reference to a letter of April 14, 2004 by President Bush to Israel’s then prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
He wrote, “In the light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major population centres, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949. … It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.” Israel thus acquires a veto on change and a US endorsement of its stand that its settlement on the West Bank (“these realities”) must not be unduly disturbed.
This is in wilful violation of the UN Security Council’s Resolution 242 of Nov 22, 1967, in the wake of the Six-Day War in June, “emphasising the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and calling for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict”.
Netanyahu held “an angry phone conversation with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Thursday [April 19] before Obama delivered his speech that day”.
Ethan Bronner of The New York Times reported that “he demanded that the president’s reference to 1967 borders be cut”. While US officials denied that Obama altered “anything under Israeli pressure”, they admitted that he “made changes in the text that delayed his appearance by 35 minutes”.
In the speech he actually delivered, on May 19, Obama asked the Palestinians not only to accept Israel’s right to exist but to abandon “efforts to delegitimise Israel”. To the Palestinians, the establishment of Israel, on May 14, 1948, was Al Nakba, the catastrophe. They are being asked, as price of a settlement, to rewrite history and accept the forcible occupiers of their lands as its legitimate owners.
This is the real significance of Netanyahu’s demand, ever since he won the February 2010 elections, that Israel must be recognised by the Palestinians as a Jewish state. This would affect the rights of Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise one-fifth of its population, and the refugees’ right to return. A million and a half Palestinian Christians and Muslims will become aliens in their own home. Obama explicitly endorsed Israel’s demand that Israel be accepted “as a Jewish state”.
Obama added that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on 1967 lines” but “with mutually agreed swaps”. Was this qualification the last minute change which delayed him by 35 minutes? Israel will have a veto on the extent of the “agreed swaps”.
Obama thus accepted the lines Bush supported in his infamous letter to Sharon in 2004. Palestine will be a nonmilitarised state at the mercy of Israeli might. So much for its ‘sovereign’ character. Obama left out the future of Jerusalem and “the fate of Palestinian refugees”. Netanyahu’s anger at Obama dissipated.
The next day (May 20) they met when both reiterated their agreed positions; except that while Obama expressed his concern at the Fatah-Hamas accord, on May 4, Netanyahu declared that Israel “cannot negotiate with a Palestinian government that is backed by Hamas”.
Soon after he won the Democratic nomination as candidate for the presidency, Obama went to the powerful Israeli lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, to declare his support for a united Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He went to AIPAC on May 22 to dispel any doubt on his full support to Israel, a “national security interest” of the US. “Agreed swaps”, he explicitly clarified, meant “a border that is different from the one that existed on June 4, 1967”.
Two days later on May 24, Netanyahu addressed a joint session of both Houses of the US Congress. Almost every sentence of his received rapturous applause; almost every second sentence won a standing ovation.
Towards the end, Netanyahu defined his terms with clarity and finality. Israel must be accepted as a Jewish state. Palestinians who were evicted in 1948 will not be permitted to return to their homes in Israel. They are free to go “out side the borders of Israel”. Jews will be free to immigrate to Israel. There will be no return to the borders of June 4, 1967 and “no division of the united capital of Israel”, Jerusalem. The Palestinian state will be demilitarised. Israel will have a “military presence along the Jordan river”. All this was packaged as “creativity”.
The former US president Jimmy Carter said on April 2, 2008 that Hamas leaders assured him that they would accept a peace settlement negotiated by Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas “on the 1967 borders”.
In his book A Place Among the Nations (1993) Netanyahu equated the Palestinian’s demand for statehood with Nazism. In 2011, he offers them a Bantustan alleging, on May 16, that they were out to extirpate Israel. The acclaim he won in Congress would confirm to Obama that, besides his own pro-Israeli position, he lacks the capacity and the domestic support for any stand that deviates significantly from Israel’s stand.
It is a dismal situation. The only hope lies in the awakening of the Arab masses and the Palestinian leaders’ resolve to forge a united front to evolve a peaceful strategy for political struggle.
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