[News] How Barack Obama learned to love Israel

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/printer6619.shtml

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

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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 
<http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/rosnerBlog.jhtml?itemNo=832667&contrassID=25&subContrassID=0&sbSubContrassID=1&listSrc=Y&art=1>"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 
<http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml>One 
Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse



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