How Barack Obama learned to love Israel
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2007
(EI Illustration)
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 "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.
From left to right, Michelle Obama, then Illinois state senator
Barack Obama, Columbia University Professor Edward Said and Mariam Said at a
May 1998 Arab community event in Chicago at which Edward Said gave the keynote
speech. (Image from archives of Ali Abunimah)
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 lethal barrages of rockets against Israeli
towns and cities 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.
Michelle Obama and Barack Obama listen to Professor Edward Said
give the keynote address at an Arab community event in Chicago, May 1998.
(Photo: Ali Abunimah)
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 One
Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse
Related Links:
Obama and the Jews, The Jewish Journal (9 March 2007)
Obama Pivots Away from Dovish Past, The Jewish Week (9 March 2007)
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"Strive as in a race to achieve the
goal of excellence in all that you do."
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Regards,
Nashid
