POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY CLIVE CROOK IN THE FINANCIAL TIMES
Obama’s speech was an extraordinarily sensitive one. Americans and others are used to hearing only clap-trap on this topic.
He actually said something, and what he said is correct.
But I have to say where is any evidence that sensitivity or truth carry any weight in American politics? And that is especially true in all matters touching on the Middle East.
America’s Right Wing has already attacked Obama’s words, as has the mob of professional apologists for Israel’s bloody excesses.
But even the great mass of Americans who take little interest in world affairs and know only the mantra lines the mainline press repeats endlessly.
Doing anything that at all conflicts with those lines earns you some hard looks.
Israel's supporters in America will use this to their benefit to prevent a genuine settlement in the Middle East, something we have every reason to believe Israel does not want.
After all, the constant, go-nowhere "peace process" serves simply to gain the decades of time for much of the rest of Palestine to be absorbed without its unwanted residents, for D-9 bulldozers to continue flattening homes and olive groves centuries old on the most specious of excuses.
Israel just ignores all agreements and documentation going into its modern re-creation from the Sykes-Picot Agreement to the Balfour Declaration and the UN maps for partition. All of them saw two states, somewhat equal in extent.
Ignored too are the UN Resolutions concerning the aftermath of the Six Day War.
Indeed, there is every reason to believe Israel engineered the Six Day War knowing full well it could handily win and make a great new land grab. We have the testimony of important historical figures on this matter, including President de Gaulle.
It was the same kind of dark-ops project as so many others, including the vicious attack on the USS Liberty in an effort to drag the U.S. into that war. The U.S. kept a massive silence over the attack on one of its ships, allowing the feeble excuse of a mistake to stand, a ridiculous claim in view of the facts the ship was extremely well marked and the attack lasted two hours.
Just as Israel’s illicit nuclear arsenal is ignored regularly in all the noise about North Korea or Iran. Ignored too was Israel’s help in proliferation by helping apartheid South Africa to briefly become a nuclear power.
The most damaging spy in American history, Jonathon Pollard, remains in prison, but there is a constant flow of intense pressure to release him.
Israeli spies were on to the perpetrators of 9/11, but the several spy groups – a phony moving company and a bunch of “art students” - were arrested afterward and sent home with no public statements about what it was that they had been doing.
If all these many events have not altered American public opinion and Israel’s place of unwarranted privilege in Washington, how will Obama ever succeeed?
I find it difficult to believe that Obama can turn around the momentum that has continued decade after decade, a momentum of slow-motion ethnic-cleansing in Palestine and America’s subsidizing the state doing it.
