Thursday 4 June 2009

Eisenhower Lives

In Cairo, apparently:

America’s strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and antisemitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighbouring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers – for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel’s founding and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security.

That is in Israel’s interest, Palestine’s interest, America’s interest, and the world’s interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the road map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them – and all of us – to live up to our responsibilities.

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the centre of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognise past agreements, and recognise Israel’s right to exist.

At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop.

Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress.

Finally, the Arab states must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognise Israel’s legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past.

America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose peace. But privately, many Muslims recognise that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognise the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true.


He doesn't explain what these "cultural and historic ties" between America and Israel actually are, of course. Number of Israeli troops in Korea? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in Vietnam? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in the Gulf? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in Afghanistan? Nil. Number of Israeli troops in Iraq? Nil. But would that America did have an Israeli-style social democracy (or what's left of it). Perhaps that was what President Obama meant.

And then there is his naughty suggestion that Israel was set up because of the Holocaust, which raises all sorts of questions, not least about how she did not become an American ally until the late Sixties at the earliest. Oh, and about why the price for the Holocaust should be paid by people in the Middle East rather than by people in, say, Germany, the ally that America (in which Germans are the largest ethnic group) would really have preferred even during the War, never mind once the War was conveniently over.

Zionism is never about the Holocaust until anyone dares to question its theory or practice. Then it is suddenly about nothing else. But by no means all the victims of the Holocaust were Jewish. Most of those who were Jewish were anything but Zionists. But the Zionist project had by then spent several decades blowing up British Jews as they went about their business as civil servants, hanging teenage British conscripts and photographing it, nearly coming to terms with Hitler, effectively fighting for him by fighting against Britain while the War was on, and so forth.

The "unbreakable" bit is rubbish. America neither has, nor should she have, unbreakable bonds with anywhere. And in point of fact it is Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates whose hired help is now Secretary of State, her mercifully unsuccessful Presidential campaign have been bankrolled by those foreign powers, an intervention which would have provoked riots if the State of Israel, as such, had made it.

And yet what a thing it is to have a conservative in the White House for a change.

President Obama represents a return to Eisenhower, who had an even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and who ended the Korean War before denouncing the military-industrial complex. A return to Nixon, who ended the Vietnam War as President Obama will end the Iraq War, and who began détente with China as President Obama is beginning détente with Iran, Cuba and beyond.

A return to the opposition to Clinton's unpatriotic job-exportation, unpatriotic sweatshop-importation, and unpatriotic global trigger-happiness, all continued and expanded by the unpatriotic Bush Administration. And a return to Reagan's bilateral arms reduction, one of the very few conservative things that he ever did, indeed quite possibly the only one.

In other words, a return to the viewing of the wider world in strictly realistic terms, "not seeking for monsters to destroy", but instead, for example, calling for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War, an outcome (also advocated by Pope Benedict XV) which would have precluded both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Such is by definition a return to that rural and Western half of the Republican Party which supported the New Deal, and to those Congressional Republicans (not all, but some) who cast the votes that passed Civil Rights in the face of Dixiecrat resistance.

So no wonder that President Obama is so popular among Catholics, white Evangelicals, Cuban-Americans, self-identifying conservatives, and so on.

And no wonder that the organisation purporting to be the Republican Party is not, and has no idea what to do with itself.

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