Is Obama ready to speak his mind?

President Obama's address at the United Nations on 23 September gave some indication that he would soon be releasing his own plan for achieving the creation of a new Arab state between Israel and Jordan - the so called "two-state solution" - that has avoided the best efforts of previous American presidents for the last sixteen years.

In his carefully crafted address he made the following statement:

The time has come to re-launch negotiations - without preconditions - that address the permanent-status issues: security for Israelis and Palestinians; borders, refugees and  Jerusalem. The goal is clear: two states living side by side in peace and security - a Jewish State of Israel, with true security for all Israelis; and a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967, and realizes the  potential of the Palestinian people.”

The insistence that such negotiations be opened "without preconditions" was a slap in the face for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who has so far refused to enter into such negotiations with Israel until Israel totally freezes all construction activity in the West Bank.

No doubt Obama had hoped that his fruitless trilateral meeting with Abbas and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu the previous day would have enabled him to tell the United Nations that negotiations were soon to resume. That was not to be.

To compound his irrational stance, Abbas has now insisted that he would not enter into any negotiations unless their end result would be the withdrawal by Israel from every inch of territory occupied by it since the Six Day War in 1967. [Wafa Palestine News Agency 22 September 2009].

Netanyahu - and previous Israeli governments - have made it clear Israel would not be obliging Abbas in this demand.

President Obama appears to have supported Netanyahu on this issue by pointedly not calling for an Israeli return to the territorial position that existed at 4 June 1967 - but merely an end to the occupation that began in 1967.

Obama's insistence that Israel be recognised as a Jewish state also is completely at odds with Abbas' long standing refusal to accept such a proposal.

Given the above, it is extremely unlikely that Abbas is politically strong enough to get off his high horse, lose face and resume negotiations with Israel without preconditions. Hamas - and Fatah, his own faction - will ensure this does not happen.

His preferred course will be to employ the tactics of the past and engage in rhetoric accusing the Israel lobby of controlling Obama and Congress and totally ignoring the victims of the conflict and their ongoing suffering.

America's contribution to a Middle East nuclear arms race

President Obama's long-promised plan for peace in the Middle East is due in October. The only question is: how is pursuing the mirage of a distant and unlikely peace between Israel and the Palestinians more pressing than the Iran's nuclear program, and the likelihood of a Middle East nuclear arms race should the Islamic Republic get the bomb? 
 
In an article appearing in the 25 August online edition of the Guardian, "Barack Obama on brink of deal for Middle East peace talks", a single sentence goes to the heart of the Obama administration's policy:

Key to bringing Israel on board [to talking with Abbas] is a promise by the US to adopt a much tougher line with Iran... "

As if Iran was only Israel's problem, and Israel was driving US policy.

What of the "existential threat" to American interests in the Gulf, the need to protect the Sunni Arab oil producers threatened by Iran, or those US forces based in Iraq and Afghanistan that the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs Adm. Mike Mullen said would be vulnerable should the US attack Iran?

It appears that US policy, from Bush to Obama, is: If an attack has to be, let Israel do it - and let Israel suffer the consequences. But if Israel doesn't bite; if the US is forced to accept responsibility and take action, then make Israel the excuse for that action, and for whatever follows.

This would not be the first time US presidents have attempted to shift the blame to Israel for an American adventure gone awry. The Reagan administration tried to make the world believe Israel was somehow responsible for the "Irangate" debacle (in fact, Reagan requested that Israel, the Saudis and the Gulf Emirates assist that US misadventure). And when the war in Iraq began to appear endless, White House aides tried to shift blame to Israel - even though Israel had in fact warned Bush not to invade.
 
And what is the president offering in the current confrontation with Iran? "Sanctions able to 'cripple' the Iranian economy."

In other words, Obama is falling back on that tried and failed Bush policy: tough talk backed up by... tough talk.

Obama, far-sighted peacemaker or naive meddler?

One day the US threatens Israel with sanctions for threatening to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. One week later, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warns that "it is unacceptable for Iran to have nuclear weapons." Adding muscle to the threat, Defense Secretary Gates arrives in Israel to discuss military options. What's real and what's not in reporting regarding the US-Israel relationship? When Israel threatens to attack Iran, is the threat substantive and imminent or theatre; the Israeli bad cop playing to Obama's good cop? When Clinton demands a complete halt to settlement construction across the Green Line, is that really US policy or is it just a bone to the Arab street? And when news media warn of a crisis in Israel-US relations, is the whispered information feeding those reports accurate or slanted to create an impression serving a hidden diplomatic purpose?

Alan Dershowitz still doesn't get it

My criticisms here of the piece Alan Dershowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal appear to be making some waves across the pond. Dershowitz has now written a lengthy defence of himself against me on his JPost blog Double Standard Watch. I had said that he had failed to address the most egregious aspects of Obama's extreme hostility towards Israel, and that this was undoubtedly because, like most American Jews, he was incapable of admitting that a Democratic President could be so vicious towards it.

In his reply, Dershowitz not only shows that he still doesn't 'get it' but also that he doesn't appear to have understood what I wrote.

An Israeli attack on Iran should serve Israeli security, not US timetable

Regardless of the motive, it is former US president George W. Bush who overthrew Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime and replaced it with one led by the Shi'ites, a regime under the influence of Iran. It was Bush, not Obama, who opened the way for an Iranian military presence and threat along the Saudi and Kuwaiti borders. It was Bush who, facing a never-ending quagmire reminiscent of Vietnam finally turned to his main opponent in Iraq, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and asked it to control the Iraqi militias and allow the US to withdraw "with dignity."

Bush, in turn, rewarded Ahmadinejad with diplomatic recognition, a first-ever US interest section in Teheran. Iran, emboldened by Bush's weakness and dependency, challenged US interests in other areas of the region, missionizing in the Saudi Peninsula, in Egypt, and even far-off Morocco. Through its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza Iran took on the IDF in Israel's north and south. If Bush did not directly create the Iranian juggernaut, then he certainly contributed to the emerging confidence Iran displays today in defying American interests in the world and in suppressing its own citizenry.

How Obama can help the Iranian people

US Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, serves on the Finance, Judiciary and Budget Committees and is a past member of the Armed Services Committee. He serves as the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee's Immigration, Refugees and Border Security subcommittee.

Last week's elections in Iran gave us a window into how the Iranian people view their own government, and showed us the brutal determination with which Teheran intends to maintain power. The elections showed millions of Iranians voting for new leadership, demanding greater freedom, and calling for an end to the policies that have isolated them from the world. These birth pangs of freedom renewed hope that a better future for the Iranian people was in the making.

A late night pitch for Shavuot

I just read a news story where US President Barack Obama said he's a night owl. As opposed to his predecessor, who was known as an 'early riser and usually in bed by 10pm', Obama often stays up past midnight going through a big stack of material he's taken into the White House residence.

This hardly seems newsworthy, but it got me thinking about the holiday of Shavuot, which begins this Thursday night.

Shavuot commemorates the anniversary of the day God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. According to a story in the Midrash, the night before the Torah was given, the Israelites retired early to be well-rested for the momentous day ahead, but they overslept and Moses had to wake them up because God was already waiting on the mountaintop. To rectify ("Le'taken', in Hebrew) this flaw in the national character, many Jews stay up all night to learn Torah in what is know as Tikkun Leil Shavuot.

American appeasement and the Iranian bomb

Saudi King Abdullah took the US president sternly to task over his emerging policy on Iran, Syria and Iraq, accusing him of giving the Islamic Republic free rein for its nuclear, expansionist and terrorism-sponsoring Middle East policies. (Source: http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=6012)

In 2003 President Bush invaded Iraq and completely upset the balance of power in the Middle East. Iraq under Saddam's Sunni regime was enemy and deterrent to Iranian hegemonic ambitions. By replacing Iraq's Sunni regime with one under Shi'ite control, Bush removed the single strategic threat, deterrent to Iranian ambitions. With the removal of Saddam, for all practical purposes the Persian threat to the Arabian Peninsula jumped from the Iraqi to the Saudi border.

And, having upset the balance between Sunni and Sh'ia inside Iraq, Bush set the stage for continuing sectarian strife in that country. Under these conditions the US grew increasingly dependent on Iran to control their Shi'ite militias. In the end Bush needed Iran to provide the fig leaf of an apparently successful "surge" which allowed the US to exit the quagmire with at least the appearance of dignity. For services rendered Bush compensated the Iranian president with the long-sought prize of US recognition of Islamic Republic legitimacy: Bush opened a State Department interest section in Teheran bringing to an end America's thirty year policy of containing the threat of the Iranian revolution.

Dear Senator George Mitchell

The author is head of the Genocide Prevention Program at Hebrew University-Hadassah School of Public Health and Community Medicine and associate director at Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Jerusalem and head of World Genocide Situation Room at GENOCIDE PREVENTION NOW (GPN). The opinions are those of the author alone and do not represent those he is affiliated with.  

Dear Senator Mitchell

I am a medical researcher whose background includes more than 30 years of work in epidemiology and environmental toxicology and injury prevention with Palestinians, Jordanians, and Egyptians and the design and supervision of joint projects in asthma in Gazan refugee camps. I have worked with the US CDC and USAID MERC on these projects. Currently, I am doing work to apply the tools of prediction and prevention to genocide and genocidal terror, with an emphasis on the role of state-sponsored hate language and incitement. Sadly, the wars and terror in the region have compelled me to move from the epidemiology of peacetime exposures to those having to do with genocide, genocidal terror, violence, war and mass atrocities.

Like many Israelis who supported the Oslo Accords, I have been mugged by reality. We have discovered that "land for peace" has morphed into "territory for terror." Like many who have thought long and hard about the troubles in our region, I have concluded that we have to stop talking about "the peace process" - a nebulous term, and use something more binding: respect for life, live and let live and human dignity for all. The "peace process" has resulted in thousands of Israeli and Palestinian deaths.

What Peres really told the Iranian people

Presidents Barack Obama and Shimon Peres both addressed the Iranian people this week in broadcast messages in honor of the Iranian new year, Nowruz. Obama sent a video message that was widely received and spoke in a respectful, conciliatory tone of a "new beginning." Peres' message was broadcast to a narrow audience on Israel Radio's Farsi Service and was less optimistic - calling on the Iranian people to choose a better leadership. The Israeli president's message was different from Obama's, and reflected the gloomy mood in the Jewish state. The differences in the messages reflects the wide gap between an American administration willing to give diplomacy with Iran a serious push and an Israeli leader's apprehension of a coming disaster.