[Peace-discuss] Ali Abunimah…

[Morton K. Brussel]

Guardian/UK

Inheriting Bush's Blinkers
Obama and American liberals readily adopt positions on Israel that  
they would deem extremist and racist in any other context

by Ali Abunimah
"I would like to ask President-elect Obama to say something please  
about the humanitarian crisis that is being experienced right now by  
the people of Gaza." Former Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney  
made her plea after disembarking from the badly damaged SS Dignity  
that had limped to the Lebanese port of Tyre while taking on water.

The small boat, carrying McKinney, the Green Party's recent  
presidential candidate, other volunteers, and several tons of donated  
medical supplies, had been trying to reach the coast of Gaza when it  
was rammed by an Israeli gunboat in international waters.

But as more than 2,400 Palestinians have been killed or injured - the  
majority civilians - since Israel began its savage bombardment of  
Gaza on 27 December, Obama has maintained his silence. "There is only  
one president at a time," his spokesmen tell the media. This  
convenient excuse has not applied, say, to Obama's detailed  
interventions on the economy, or his condemnation of the "coordinated  
attacks on innocent civilians" in Mumbai in November.

The Mumbai attacks were a clear-cut case of innocent people being  
slaughtered. The situation in the Middle East however is seen as more  
"complicated" and so polite opinion accepts Obama's silence not as  
the approval for Israel's actions that it certainly is, but as  
responsible statesmanship.

It ought not to be difficult to condemn Israel's murder of civilians  
and bombing of civilian infrastructure including hundreds of private  
homes, universities, schools, mosques, civil police stations and  
ministries, and the building housing the only freely-elected Arab  
parliament.

It ought not to be risky or disruptive to US foreign policy to say  
that Israel has an unconditional obligation under the Fourth Geneva  
Convention to lift its lethal, months-old blockade preventing  
adequate food, fuel, surgical supplies, medications and other basic  
necessities from reaching Gaza.

But in the looking-glass world of American politics, Israel, with its  
powerful first-world army, is the victim, and Gaza - the besieged and  
blockaded home to 1.5 million immiserated people, half of them  
children and eighty percent refugees - is the aggressor against whom  
no cruelty is apparently too extreme.

While feigning restraint, Obama has telegraphed where he really  
stands; senior adviser David Axelrod told CBS on 28 December that  
Obama understood Israel's urge to "respond" to attacks on its  
citizens. Axelrod claimed that "this situation has become even more  
complicated in the last couple of days and weeks as Hamas began its  
shelling [and] Israel responded".

The truce Hamas had meticulously upheld was shattered when Israel  
attacked Gaza, killing six Palestinians, as The Guardian itself  
reported on 5 November. A blatant disregard for the facts, it seems,  
will not leave the White House with George Bush on 20 January.

Axelrod also recalled Obama's visit to Israel last July when he  
ignored Palestinians and visited the Israeli town of Sderot. There,  
Obama declared: "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. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."

This should not surprise anyone. Despite pervasive wishful thinking  
that Obama would abandon America's pro-Israel bias, his approach has  
been almost indistinguishable from the Bush administration's (as I  
showed in a longer analysis.

Along with Tony Blair and George Bush, Obama staunchly supported  
Israel's war against Lebanon in July-August 2006, where it used  
cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing more than 1,000 people.

Obama's comments in Sderot echoed what he said in a speech to the  
powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, in March 2007. He recalled an  
earlier visit to the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona near the border  
with Lebanon which he said reminded him of an American suburb. There,  
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).

Obama has identified his daughters repeatedly with Israeli children,  
while never having uttered a word about the thousands - thousands -  
of Palestinian and Lebanese children killed and permanently maimed by  
Israeli attacks just since 2006. This allegedly post-racial president  
appears fully invested in the racist worldview that considers Arab  
lives to be worth less than those of Israelis and in which Arabs are  
always "terrorists".

The problem is much wider than Obama: American liberals in general  
see no contradiction in espousing positions supporting Israel that  
they would deem extremist and racist in any other context. The cream  
of America's allegedly "progressive" Democratic party vanguard -  
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Foreign Relations Committee  
Chairman Howard Berman, New York Senator Charles Schumer, among  
others - have all offered unequivocal support for Israel's massacres  
in Gaza, describing them as "self-defence".

And then there's Hillary Clinton, the incoming secretary of state and  
self-styled champion of women and the working classes, who won't let  
anyone outbid her anti-Palestinian positions.

Democrats are not simply indifferent to Palestinians. In the recent  
presidential election, their efforts to win swing states like Florida  
often involved espousing positions dehumanising to Palestinians in  
particular and Arabs and Muslims in general. Many liberals know this  
is wrong but tolerate it silently as a price worth paying (though not  
to be paid by them) to see a Democrat in office.

Even those further to the left implicitly accept Israel's logic.  
Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, criticised Israel's  
attacks on Gaza as a "reckless" and "disproportionate response" to  
Hamas rocket attacks that he deemed "immoral". There are many others  
who do nothing to support nonviolent resistance to Israeli occupation  
and colonisation, such as boycott, divestment and sanctions but who  
are quick to condemn any desperate Palestinian effort - no matter how  
ineffectual and symbolic - to resist Israel's relentless aggression.

Similarly, we can expect that the American university professors who  
have publicly opposed the academic boycott of Israel on grounds of  
protecting "academic freedom" will remain just as silent about  
Israel's bombing of the Islamic University of Gaza as they have about  
Israel's other attacks on Palestinian academic institutions.

There is no silver lining to Israel's slaughter in Gaza, but the  
reactions to it should at least serve as a wake-up call: when it  
comes to the struggle for peace and justice in Palestine, the  
American liberal elites who are about to assume power present as  
formidable an obstacle as the outgoing Bush administration and its  
neoconservative backers.

© 2009 Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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