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Obama was Unconvinced by Bibi’s Desire for Peace
Barack Obama, they say, did not get on well with Bibi Netanyahu when he met him in Jerusalem before the American elections.
Mr Obama, who figured out the Middle East pretty quickly, apparently found Bibi arrogant and unconvincing in his professed desire for peace with the Palestinians. What Mr Netanyahu thought of Mr Obama is not known, but he could scarcely have tried to hide his election line: security for Israel, but no Palestinian state.
Much depends, of course, on whether Tzipi Livni will consent to join a Netanyahu government. For if Avigdor Lieberman slips into a ministerial position, Obama is in trouble. Does he congratulate a new Israeli prime minister who has introduced into his government a man who is prepared to demand loyalty signatures from his own country's Arab minority? How would that go down in the United States, where a similar proposal - for a loyalty pledge by American minorities, for example - would be a scandal?
But those Palestinians who believe that Lieberman should be in a Netanyahu administration - on the grounds that the "true" face of Israel would then be clear to all Americans - are being a little premature. Obama is not going to change the US relationship with Israel. American foreign policy - like that of most states - is based not on justice but on power.
And with America enduring the worst economic crisis since the Depression, Mr Obama is not going to take on the Israelis. Those Arabs who still fondly hope that the new US administration will at last "stand up" to Israel are mistaken. And the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who would like to be the next Democrat president, is certainly not going to anger Israel or its supporters in Washington.
If Mr Netanyahu does form a government, however, it will prove that the slaughter in Gaza did not help Ms Livni's efforts to form her own cabinet. Ehud Barak and Livni, the authors of the whole bloody offensive (with the active help of Hamas' own provocations), will simply put Gaza behind them - until Mr Netanyahu decides on a second round of the battle against "world terror".
Yet it's interesting to note how easily the connections between Gaza and the Israeli election have faded away. Indeed, when The Economist was surveying the Middle East earlier this month, it suggested that the outrage over the Gaza killings expressed by the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to Israel's President Shimon Peres at Davos was a "temper tantrum" which may have been "a ploy to please voters" before Turkish municipal elections next month. Yet the magazine merely noted that "the unconcluded Gaza war and the [Israeli] elections are intertwined in voters' minds..."
Mr Netanyahu, it should be remembered, said the Gaza war ended too soon. So are we waiting for Part Two? Or the next round in Israel's war with the Hizbollah? Israelis must sometimes curse the proportional electoral system that brings them the most ungovernable government coalitions. But the Americans will find it hard to dress up a new Netanyahu government as further "progress" in the Middle East "peace process".
21 Comments so far
Show All'But the Americans will find it hard to dress up a new Netanyahu government as further "progress" in the Middle East "peace process".'
I'm reminded of a rather nasty saying from a few years back; 'kill 'em all, and let god sort it out.' Perhaps that's indeed what's going to happen with the mideast. After all, god is the greatest of the mass murderers (eg, Noah's flood, Sodom and Gommorah(sp.), all the little babies that die just after being born, every kitten who dies because you masturbate)
But bibi does desire a peace, or rather a pax. Where you leave behind death and destruction and call that peace, Roman's were famous for it.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I have profound respect for Robert Fisk. But i don't know why he said that obama figured out the ME pretty quickly. I don't see real evidence of that. He has always said he supported israel. And i just heard the new U.N. delegate he appointed being interviewed.
She said that the u.s. will always stand with israel, no matter who their leader is, when asked about Netanyahu. She said he was PM before and we supported him then and we will now.
R., I think the question you ask in your second sentence is quite literally answered by your second to last sentence.
I see Russia & Iran now dictating the calculus of the ME. We are dependant on them to wage war in P & A. This, I believe, has forced Israel to temporarily suspend plans to vaporize Natanz and all it's inhabitants.
As always, all peace to you. joseph.
I think Fisk didn't bother to leave his Beirut apartment for this piece. As for the mysterious Palestinians he evokes as saying that Bibi will present the "true face" of Israel, they already said this when Sharon was elected. But I think we've alredy seen, over and over, the "true face" of Israel, though it has many masks, all of them death masks. Take your pick of "true faces": Tzipi "Blitzkrieg" Livni, Golda "There Are No Palestinans" Meir, Yitzhak "Force Might Beatings" Rabin, Menachem "Stern Gang" Begin, Ariel "Sabra and Shatila" Sharon (aka Ariel "I've lived in a vegetative state longer than Generalissimo Franco" Sharon), and the list goes on and on, back to the original authors of the ethnic cleansing, Saint David "Drive them out" Ben-Gurion and Theodor "Spirit the penniless population across the frontier" Herzl.
CLOVIS; excellent post.
I agree, good post.
Is Sharon still with us? I liked the comparison to Franco, who died clinging to the mummified arm of Saint Theresa of Avila. (Dictators have special privileges, you know?) I'm sure Netanyahu and Franco would have detested each other, for all the wrong reasons, of course.
Professor Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at Oxford, wrote an interesting book on all this, The Iron Wall. His thesis being that the Israelis have rarely been serious about peace.
Would Obama have to take on the Israelis if he just told Netanyahu (Who boasted 9/11 was good for Israel) that "Sorry our financial crises means we cannot afford to give you free billions a year anymore since it has not helped bring peace in the middle East. Thanks but no Thanks, Your Lefty Friend, Barak."
I know I am a Dreamer!
But this is not a game any longer and Obama does not have much time left to get it right because it may already be too late to fix. Maybe in these matters the speed in which we act is inversely proportional to the thickness of the cusion we are sitting on.
Cheers!
I'm reserving judgement on Obama for his first hundred days. But so far, I'm tending to think . . . Thank God for him!
Pan
Enlightening posts.
Fool all the people ahh some dah some of the ??
well not all the sheep ? anyway :)
Liberty and freedom for all
and a Transparent Democracy
If Obama wants to have any realistic hope of winning over the people of the ME, he MUST push Israel in some way to a fair and just two-state solution.
If he doesn't, I am definitely going to start siding with those who label him a Zionist stooge.
MARCO; remember he told AIPAC that he favored an undivided jewish jerusalem during the campaign. dennis ross wrote his speech for AIPAC. biden said[ i am a zionist, one does not have to be a jew to be a zionist.]
A couple of things to remember in our dealings with Israel and the ME.
1. The "heroic" founders of Israel got their start blowing up British school buses in Palestine in the forties.
2. If uncounted millions of Americans were homeless and starving in the streets, if there was no more medicine or education in America, we would still be giving Israel its yearly quota of three billion dollar$ or more, even if we had to borrow it from China. You just don't understand priorities.
MINITRUE; let us not forget the KING DAVID HOTEL that the israeli terrorists blew up. yes, they were considered terrorists, then the zionist propaganda machine came out. and they were called freedom fighters. ironic is it not.
They also targeted and assasinated British officials who weren't sufficiently pro-Zion.
On the issue of Israel, I would definitely recommend a 3rd party as both are owned lock stock and barrel by AIPAC.
NN1; AIPAC=== formerly called THE AMERICAN ZIONIST COUNCIL===not too catchy of a name, so now we have AIPAC. they should be investigated by a real american justice department. not an american denial department.
I was reading Wiki to learn if the Security Council actually passed RES 181 partitioning Palestine. It seems as if they never did. There are all sorts of endruns and almosts, but it seems not to ever have the clear cut affirmative vote in the Security Council.
This would explain israels insecurity and deadly insistence on Hamas' recognition.
Fisk wrote, "Ehud Barak and Livni, the authors of the whole bloody offensive (with the active help of Hamas' own provocations), will simply put Gaza behind them - until Mr Netanyahu decides on a second round of the battle against "world terror"".
Fisk clearly forgot to include "in my opinion" when writing "(with the active help of Hamas' own provocations)", for many people disagree with that opinion of his, and this includes excellently critical Jews who don't fault Hamas or Palestinians firing rockets into Israel ... quite at all. Instead, they really only fault the sole truly guilty party, the Israeli or U.S.-Israel govt, and including words condemning the govt for its now 61 years of war of aggression, oppression, apartheidism, genocide, murderous genocide, ... against Palestinians; while also adding that if Hamas or simply Palestinian fighters resisting against Israel as best as they can, which is unfortunately little, are terrorists, then also were the Jews who resisted, through fighting and other means of combat, against the Nazis. Iow, the [intelligent] and sane Jews are not faulting Hamas or any Palestinian resistance forces, but instead speak of them as analogous to the Jewish resistance fighters who fought, as best as they also could, against the Nazi forces; and the analogy is totally fitting, very perfect. It'd be difficult to come up with a better or more exact analogy.
What does Fisk expect, for all Palestinians to not do anything to try to oppose the U.S.-Israeli extreme war of aggression, oppression, incursions, occupations, etcetera, against Palestinians; to be holy, saintly little "catholic" boys who never occasionally fire rockets, home-made and very minor rockets, into Israel as acts of not provocation, but really retaliation and expression of anger at the U.S.-Israel state that cold-bloodedly, diabolically, psychopathically, ... does as it's been doing for 61 years, all of these many years or decades of hell perpetrated against Palestinians?
Fisk infers that he wants pure little boys and girls of Palestinians; that none are to get at all angry and occasionally fire home-made and inneffective rockets into Israel. And that's as if these occasional and ineffective acts by some, relatively few Palestinians constitute the reason behind Israel's or U.S.-Israel's extreme, supreme and diabolically psychopathic crimes against really all Palestinians. Furthermore, given this realist understanding, we can understanding that Fisk is lying in claiming that Hamas actually provokes Israel to any real degree. It's not a total lie, for some Palestinians do fire rockets into Israel, but it definitely is a half-truth kind of lie, for these rockets are fired not as acts of aggression, but as retaliation, retaliating anger, which means that they're fired because of Israel's extreme criminality against Palestinians.
Fisk has been caught lying, minimally through the use of half-truths, before, and he's doing it again. Pointy-headed Christian he evidently is! It seems he'd prefer his perverted or distorted puritanical views would be the ones Palestinians would abide by, treating himself like some sort of God-elevated pontiff vis-a-vis Palestinians, the extremely crushed, plighted, genocided, ... Palestinians.
He doesn't seem to like Hizbollah, either, and there's this common characteristic about it and Hamas; they're both Muslim resistance groups that oppose U.S.-Israel or rather West-Israel, given Europe, Britain and Canada all side with Israel throughout all of this, for their leaders pander to the U.S., want to stay buddy-buddy with the U.S. Meanwhile, Fisk is of some Christian church, I believe to have once read over the past few years or more anyway.
I'd prefer that Palestinians would not fire rockets into Israel, but rather only because it fuels or increases (seems to anyway) Israeli support for the extremely criminal (U.S.-)Israel govt, and Palestinians don't need that support which is against them to be increasing; they need it to decrease. But I can't claim to [know] that the result would be of decreasing order, either; and can't fault Hamas or any other Palestinians for occasionally retaliating against the extreme and long-continuing U.S.-Israel crimes of supreme order against Palestinians.
Faulting Hamas is something Fisk should seriously consider to cease doing, for continuing it doesn't do him any good reputationally speaking!
Instead, he should carefully consider the excellent words of the Jewish MP of England or Britain in the following video clip, and which is only one good example of Jews speaking out in similar terms today. This was posted by eshiboi on Jan 16th, while the Jewish British MP is Sir Gerald Kaufman.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=CA&hl=en&v=i7lx5ZsUQYE
Fisk could also carefully consider the many excellent statements of British MP George Galloway.
No John Pilger is this Robert Fisk guy, who's replaceable, for there are many other good reporters, especially when we look internationally. Fisk is definitely replaceable. Pilger? No; not replaceable is he. When Pilger writes about the Israel-Palestine conflict, we don't read him writing like some pin-headed pontiff about Hamas and Palestinian rockets occasionally (and, again, very ineffectively) fired into Israel, or when he includes mention of the latter, then it's not in terms of really faulting the Palestinians firing the rockets and whatever Palestinian group or organisation they are members of.
Pilger "blows" Fisk "away" in terms of qualitative analysis and investigative reporting, and it's entirely Fisk's fault, for he has the human potential to correct his shortcomings.
I agree, Mike, though don't forget that Fisk is in the pay of The Independent, whereas Pilger truly is independent. I get the feeling sometimes that Fisk makes statements he doesn't necessarily believe but merely sends out to the world to feed the sharks at the helm.
Robert Fisk, a usually comprehensive researcher, writes that Barack Obama and Bibi Netanyahu did not get along well during their pre-election meeting in Jerusalem, that Obama apparently found the Likud standard bearer "arrogant and unconvincing....... What Mr. Netanyahu thought of Mr. Obama is not known....."
Just over this weekend, the New York Times (and presumably some other mainstream US news sources) reported Netanyahu's version of the two leaders' meeting in Jerusalem last fall. The spin according to Bibi was that he and Barack got along just fine. Both were "pragmatists" who had moved to the political center of their respective national political spectrums, with Netanyahu characterizing himself as "formerly on the right wing", and President Obama being "formerly from the left."
Note carefully how the goal posts deftly moved with Netanyahu's quoted comments. The Likudnik right wingers are now on the fifty yard line, and the American left has been marginalized and left behind. This is a framing exercise lifted straight from Karl Rove's playbook.
Bill from Saginaw