[Peace-discuss] Obama in the Lobby (via the servants' entrance)

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Obama spoke to AIPAC Friday, and we're not surprised to learn that 
"There was absolutely nothing in Obama's speech that deviated from the 
hardline consensus underpinning US policy in the region." --CGE]

	How Barack Obama learned to love Israel
	Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2007

I first met Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama almost 
ten years ago when, as my representative in the Illinois state senate, 
he came to speak at the University of Chicago. He impressed me as 
progressive, intelligent and charismatic. I distinctly remember thinking 
'if only a man of this calibre could become president one day.'

On Friday Obama gave a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs 
Committee (AIPAC) in Chicago. It had been much anticipated in American 
Jewish political circles which buzzed about his intensive efforts to woo 
wealthy pro-Israel campaign donors who up to now have generally leaned 
towards his main rival Senator Hillary Clinton.

Reviewing the speech, Ha'aretz Washington correspondent Shmuel Rosner 
concluded that Obama "sounded as strong as Clinton, as supportive as 
Bush, as friendly as Giuliani. At least rhetorically, Obama passed any 
test anyone might have wanted him to pass. So, he is pro-Israel. Period."

Israel is "our strongest ally in the region and its only established 
democracy," Obama said, assuring his audience that "we must preserve our 
total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel by fully 
funding military assistance and continuing work on the Arrow and related 
missile defense programs." Such advanced multi-billion dollar systems he 
asserted, would help Israel "deter missile attacks from as far as Tehran 
and as close as Gaza." As if the starved, besieged and traumatized 
population of Gaza are about to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Obama offered not a single word of criticism of Israel, of its 
relentless settlement and wall construction, of the closures that make 
life unlivable for millions of Palestinians.

There was no comfort for the hundreds of thousands of people in Gaza who 
live in the dark, or the patients who cannot get dialysis, because of 
what Israeli human rights group B'Tselem termed "one cold, calculated 
decision, made by Israel's prime minister, defense minister, and IDF 
chief of staff" last summer to bomb the only power plant in Gaza," a 
decision that "had nothing to do with the attempts to achieve [the] 
release [of a captured soldier] nor any other military need." It was a 
gratuitous war crime, one of many condemned by human rights 
organizations, against an occupied civilian population who under the 
Fourth Geneva Convention Israel is obligated to protect.

While constantly emphasizing his concern about the threat Israelis face 
from Palestinians, Obama said nothing about the exponentially more 
lethal threat Israelis present to Palestinians. In 2006, according to 
B'Tselem, Israeli occupation forces killed 660 Palestinians of whom 141 
were children -- triple the death toll for 2005. In the same period, 23 
Israelis were killed by Palestinians, half the number of 2005 (by 
contrast, 500 Israelis die each year in road accidents).

But Obama was not entirely insensitive to ordinary lives. He recalled a 
January 2006 visit to the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona that resembled 
an ordinary American suburb where he could imagine the sounds of Israeli 
children at "joyful play just like my own daughters." He saw a home the 
Israelis told him was damaged by a Hizbullah rocket (no one had been 
hurt in the incident).

Six months later, Obama said, "Hizbullah launched four thousand rocket 
attacks just like the one that destroyed the home in Kiryat Shmona, and 
kidnapped Israeli service members."

Obama's phrasing suggests that Hizbullah launched thousands of rockets 
in an unprovoked attack, but it's a complete distortion. Throughout his 
speech he showed a worrying propensity to present discredited propaganda 
as fact. As anyone who checks the chronology of last summer's Lebanon 
war will easily discover, Hizbullah only launched rockets against 
Israeli towns after Israel had heavily bombed civilian neighborhoods in 
Lebanon killing hundreds of civilians, many fleeing the Israeli onslaught.

Obama excoriated Hizbullah for using "innocent people as shields." 
Indeed, after dozens of civilians were massacred in an Israeli air 
attack on Qana on July 30, Israel "initially claimed that the military 
targeted the house because Hezbollah fighters had fired rockets from the 
area," according to an August 2 statement from Human Rights Watch.

The statement added: "Human Rights Watch researchers who visited Qana on 
July 31, the day after the attack, did not find any destroyed military 
equipment in or near the home. Similarly, none of the dozens of 
international journalists, rescue workers and international observers 
who visited Qana on July 30 and 31 reported seeing any evidence of 
Hezbollah military presence in or around the home. Rescue workers 
recovered no bodies of apparent Hezbollah fighters from inside or near 
the building." The Israelis subsequently changed their story, and 
neither in Qana, nor anywhere else did Israel ever present, or 
international investigators ever find evidence to support the claim 
Hizbullah had a policy of using civilians as human shields.

In total, forty-three Israeli civilians were killed by Hizbullah rockets 
during the thirty-four day war. For every Israeli civilian who died, 
over twenty-five Lebanese civilians were killed by indiscriminate 
Israeli bombing -- over one thousand in total, a third of them children. 
Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israel's use of cluster 
bombs against Lebanese civilians. But Obama defended Israel's assault on 
Lebanon as an exercise of its "legitimate right to defend itself."

There was absolutely nothing in Obama's speech that deviated from the 
hardline consensus underpinning US policy in the region. Echoing the 
sort of exaggeration and alarmism that got the United States into the 
Iraq war, he called Iran "one of the greatest threats to the United 
States, to Israel, and world peace." While advocating "tough" diplomacy 
with Iran he confirmed that "we should take no option, including 
military action, off the table." He opposed a Palestinian unity 
government between Hamas and Fatah and insisted "we must maintain the 
isolation of Hamas" until it meets the Quartet's one-sided conditions. 
He said Hizbullah, which represents millions of Lebanon's 
disenfranchised and excluded, "threatened the fledgling movement for 
democracy" and blamed it for "engulf[ing] that entire nation in violence 
and conflict."

Over the years since I first saw Obama speak I met him about half a 
dozen times, often at Palestinian and Arab-American community events in 
Chicago including a May 1998 community fundraiser at which Edward Said 
was the keynote speaker. In 2000, when Obama unsuccessfully ran for 
Congress I heard him speak at a campaign fundraiser hosted by a 
University of Chicago professor. On that occasion and others Obama was 
forthright in his criticism of US policy and his call for an even-handed 
approach to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a gathering 
in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. He was in the midst of a primary 
campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for the United States 
Senate seat he now occupies. But at that time polls showed him trailing.

As he came in from the cold and took off his coat, I went up to greet 
him. He responded warmly, and volunteered, "Hey, I'm sorry I haven't 
said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. 
I'm hoping when things calm down I can be more up front." He referred to 
my activism, including columns I was contributing to the The Chicago 
Tribune critical of Israeli and US policy, "Keep up the good work!"

But Obama's gradual shift into the AIPAC camp had begun as early as 2002 
as he planned his move from small time Illinois politics to the national 
scene. In 2003, Forward reported on how he had "been courting the 
pro-Israel constituency." He co-sponsored an amendment to the Illinois 
Pension Code allowing the state of Illinois to lend money to the Israeli 
government. Among his early backers was Penny Pritzker -- now his 
national campaign finance chair -- scion of the liberal but staunchly 
Zionist family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain. (The Hyatt Regency hotel 
on Mount Scopus was built on land forcibly expropriated from Palestinian 
owners after Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967). He has also 
appointed several prominent pro-Israel advisors.

Obama has also been close to some prominent Arab Americans, and has 
received their best advice. His decisive trajectory reinforces a lesson 
that politically weak constituencies have learned many times: access to 
people with power alone does not translate into influence over policy. 
Money and votes, but especially money, channelled through sophisticated 
and coordinated networks that can "bundle" small donations into million 
dollar chunks are what buy influence on policy. Currently, advocates of 
Palestinian rights are very far from having such networks at their 
disposal. Unless they go out and do the hard work to build them, or to 
support meaningful campaign finance reform, whispering in the ears of 
politicians will have little impact. (For what it's worth, I did my 
part. I recently met with Obama's legislative aide, and wrote to Obama 
urging a more balanced policy towards Palestine.)

If disappointing, given his historically close relations to 
Palestinian-Americans, Obama's about-face is not surprising. He is 
merely doing what he thinks is necessary to get elected and he will 
continue doing it as long as it keeps him in power. 
Palestinian-Americans are in the same position as civil libertarians who 
watched with dismay as Obama voted to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act, 
or immigrant rights advocates who were horrified as he voted in favor of 
a Republican bill to authorize the construction of a 700-mile fence on 
the border with Mexico.

Only if enough people know what Obama and his competitors stand for, and 
organize to compel them to pay attention to their concerns can there be 
any hope of altering the disastrous course of US policy in the Middle 
East. It is at best a very long-term project that cannot substitute for 
support for the growing campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions 
needed to hold Israel accountable for its escalating violence and 
solidifying apartheid.

Ali Abunimah is the co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of 
One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse