The Audacity of Hope

The Palestinian bid for UN membership at this stage may look like a gimmick, the American veto being the real point for future propaganda purposes.

But the AIPAC and ADL crowd, representative of nothing and no one but itself, is no base of Obama's, having campaigned almost insanely to prevent his nomination, and having done little, to put it politely, to secure his election. The adherents of that strange thing, Christian Zionism (what is it with America as a hotbed of heterodoxies?), did not vote for him last time and would never vote for him next time, no matter what he said or did. He beat AIPAC and the ADL for the nomination, and he beat the Left Behind lot at the election.

So, what if Obama told them where to stick it, told them that it was payback time? What if he said that the security of American citizens, or even just their economic interests in the enormous number of countries supporting this move, simply mattered more? What if he pointed out that it was a very recent and thoroughly pernicious innovation for American foreign policy to be based on (frankly, adolescent) ideological rigidity rather than on cold, hard reality? What if he mentioned Nixon and China, or the gravely underrated Gerald Ford and Helsinki, with the countless lives saved by the sense to accept that the real world is the real world, whether or not one might happen to like it? And what if he asked what the Israelis had ever done for America?

What would actually happen if there were no American veto after all?