[News] Obama's deadly silence

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10097.shtml

Obama's deadly silence
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 2 January 2009

[]

Barack Obama is presented with a t-shirt by Sderot mayor Eli Moyal as 
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak (left) looks on after inspecting 
homemade Palestinian rockets during his visit to the southern Israeli 
town last year. (David Silverman/Getty Images)

"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 reported on 
5 November. A blatant disregard for the facts, it seems, will not 
leave the White House with George W. 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 <http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9969.shtml>almost 
indistinguishable from the Bush administration's.

Along with Tony Blair and George W. 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 Hizballah 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-defense."

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 dehumanizing 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, criticized 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 colonization, 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.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10097.shtml>One Country: A 
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan 
Books, 2006). This essay was first published in The Guardian's 
Comment is Free and is republished with the author's permission.



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