All right things in the right tone were said and delivered in Barack Obama’s Middle East policy speech and the subsequent interview with Andrew Marr but is it/he going to change anything? The grey area appears less grey, but it has not changed the fundamental problems; the Palestinians would not recognize the existence of the State of Israel as it is (the starter condition in his speech), Obama’s security pointer is piffle when every Palestinian attack is met by tenfold Israeli retaliation, Obama only has a meagre majority in the Senate and the Republicans control the House of Representatives, and average Americans are most concerned about their own economy.
Read Al-Ahram commentary; Illegitimate and Untouchable
Read Arab News article ‘Saudis call Obama speech meaningless drivel
David Miliband in Islamabad – ‘Pakistan is feeling bruised, abused and confused.’
Read The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy by John J Measheimer and Stephen M. Walt (2007). ’Americans need to understand the real history of Israel’s founding and the true story of its subsequent conduct. Instead of passively accepting the Leon Uris version of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Americans need to absorb and reflect on the findings of Israel’s “new historians,” whose courageous scholarship has shed much-needed light on what the Zionists’ campaign to build a Jewish state in the midst of an indigenous Arab population entailed. Although the two situations are hardly identical, one cannot understand Zionism without understanding the long history of Christian anti-Semitism, and one cannot fathom contemporary Palestinian nationalism without being aware of the events surrounding the 1948 war, which Israelis call the War of Independence but Palestinians call al-Nakba, or “the Catastrophe.” (p350-1)
