Obama still misses the point

President Barak Obama’s (and that of several other US congressmen) continued appeasement of Israel is unconscionable, especially coming in the wake of the blatant anti-Obama stance of arrogant Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who was recently been discredited by many Israelis as well as Jewish leaders abroad.

“No administration has done more for Israel’s security than mine,” Obama bragged in a just-revealed letter to Rep. Jerrold Nadler (Democrat of New York), which has been described as an impressive and costly list of “our enhanced support of Israel”.

The letter, published by The Washington Post columnist Walter Pincus on Tuesday, underlined the fact that “the administration is holding talks with Israeli officials to extend for an additional decade the Bush administration’s 10-year, $30 billion plan to pay for Israel’s foreign military purchases of equipment and training, mostly from US firms”.

The new deal, which is expected to increase the amount of aid, will “cement for the next decade our unprecedented levels of military assistance”, Obama reportedly pointed out.

Moreover, a recent Congressional Research Service study is said to have found that the US military assistance has not only “helped transform Israel’s armed forces into one of the most technologically sophisticated militaries in the world”, but also helped Israel build a domestic defence industry, which ranks as one of the top 10 suppliers of arms worldwide”.

Despite the fact that the US Defence Department has just disclosed a $1.9 billion sale to Saudi Arabia of 10 MH-60R multi-mission helicopters for use against “maritime threats” and “to strengthen its homeland defence”, and that unidentified Arab Gulf states have also been promised “critical defence capabilities”, this Obama action has not yielded any positive results as far as the Palestinians are concerned.

Pincus explained: “These costly steps are being taken not to gain Israeli support for the [draft] agreement” with Iran over its nuclear arsenal but “designed to justify their voting against a congressional resolution of the [Iran] agreement that will be voted upon when Congress returns [from holiday] in September”.

Sorely missing from the hackneyed Obama gesture to Israel is a firm position against its ignoble policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians, especially at a time Netanyahu has been slapped in the face by fellow Israelis and Jewish groups over his treatment of the Palestinians.

A prominent Israeli columnist, Bradley Burston, wrote courageously and admirably in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz, on August 17, a column titled “It is time to admit it. Israeli policy is what it is: it is apartheid”.

His opening line was: “What I’m about to write will not come easily for me.” 

Then he went on to highlight how Israeli “terrorists firebombed a West Bank Palestinian home, annihilating a family, murdering an 18-month-old boy and his father, burning his mother over 90 per cent of her body — only to have the Israeli government rule the family ineligible for financial support and compensation automatically granted Israeli victims of terrorism, settlers included”.

Burston continued: “Just one week later, pro-settlement Jews hurled rocks, furniture and bottles of urine at Israeli soldiers and police at a West Bank settlement, and in response Benjamin Netanyahu immediately rewarded the Jewish stone-throwers with a pledge to build hundreds of new settlement homes. That is what has become the rule of law. Our Israel is what it has become. Apartheid.”

The America’s president needs to open his eyes.

And here is what an honourable American president, Jimmy Carter, had to say as he revealed his shocking encounter with cancer this week: “These are the worst prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians for years.” 

He said he did not think Netanyahu “has any intention” of making any progress towards the goal, the thrust of international efforts for decades, of creating a separate state for Palestinians alongside Israel.

The former president asserted that “the Netanyahu government decided early on to adopt a one-state solution” — a point that is now seemingly attractive to some Palestinians.

The upcoming visit of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to Iran may throw more light on the relationship with Tehran and its policy towards the long-simmering Arab-Israeli problem.

The writer is a Washington-based columnist.