Let me give my perspective on this. I am a Palestinian, born in the Galilee in “Israel,” forced with my family to leave the farm we had owned for five centuries (since we came to Palestine as refugees from the loss of Al-Andaus to Castilian Spain), and declared absentees who had no right to live there (this happened in 1965, when I was eight).
I totally support Obama for president, even though I also believe he means what he says and will be as blindly pro-Zionist as he sounds. That is because it is an iron law of American politics that to be elected, your position on Palestine has to be awful. There is no one that can be taken seriously in American politics who is not awful on Palestine. Even the post-presidential, well-meaning Jimmy Carter, who does not need to worry about elections anymore, is only tolerable.
I want an American president who does well on all the other topics he or she must deal with– and I pray only that he or she will shut up and get out of the way and let the rest of the world work out Palestine, since it is political suicide for an American politician to do the right thing. We don’t need “honest broker†America. That is not possible. Ideally, the American government would develop amnesia about the Middle East and just do nothing at all there– for or against anyone. Just shut up and get out of the way.
Presumably Obama will not be as overtly bellicose (and incompetent) as Bush. That would be a first step in the right direction.
“Just shut up and get out of the way.”
I think that will be the global mantra towards the US for the 21st century. And not just about Palestine.
Which is a shame, but we brought it on ourselves.
It would be a breath of fresh air if a candidate were to demonstrate a loyalty to THE UNITED STATES over and above their loyalty to Israel – a Terrorist State, the mother of all terrorist states, an utterly foreign occupier perpetrating and American endorsed and funded genocide upon an indigenous people. Israel, is The Enemy.
Hmmm, the Israeli tail does not wag the US dog.
You did an @ to me on Twitter, and that’s how I discovered you and am now Following you.
We have much in common. You may have noticed I have an Israel flag in my Twitter avatar.
I’m a Christian Anarchist Pacifist. I support Israel’s right to exist as a nation, but I have great compassion for all Muslims, Palestinians included. I do not support all Israeli policies or actions.
I am extreme in my anti-war protest, and experience much persecution for it. I recently discovered Leo Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God is Within You” book, considered one of the most radical anti-authoritarian anti-war books ever published.
I want to learn from you, so I will be reading your blog and Twitter tweets with great interest.
Peace, dear friend!
Wow! Thank you and welcome. You made my day. Will get Tolstoy’s book. Peace to you too. (And one day hopefully, to the Middle East too..)
Steve is vaspersthegrate on Twitter.
http://twitter.com/vaspersthegrate.
and blogs here
http://www.pluperfecter.blogspot.com/
“Hmmm, the Israeli tail does not wag the US dog.”
If not, what other explanation is there for America’s unconditional support of what Israel is doing to the Palestinian people? Israel is utterly and totally dependent of the US aid and therefore could be made to act in a completely different manner, it doesn’t happen, why not?
The interests of both countries coincide, hegemony in the Middle East as the goal. But I definitely see Israel as the junior partner here, they do not call the shots.
That brands the US with complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people. It has the power to stop it but doesn’t.
My 2 cents worth dates back 4k years to a time when Cancer was called Beehive and harvest on the Nile took place while the Milky Way and Beehive dominated the night sky. It was called the TIME of milk and honey, not land of …. There was little fighting over it and much of what was accomplished still exists. The notion that a god gave a people a particular place to live and thrive is entirely religious and skewed … the so-called holy land was shared by many tribes then and could be again, without modern religions. The various people behaved themselves then because their ‘god’ was a king in Egypt and they lived in a territory he claimed and administered. When the king was weak, as with Akenaton, chaos reigned in the provences and on the frontier with Anatolia.
Maybe that is what is needed now … some nation powerful enough to dictate terms and make them stick.
Which nation can make that happen? Most of the last century was spent longing for ‘aliens’, (the outer space kind) to come and sort things out. I don’t see that happening, but it occurs to me that with US help, Israel is strong enough to make a lasting, just peace. If they only believed!
Unfortunately for that theory, British colonialism brought with it the concept of ethnic nationalism– a tool, the Brits used effectively to manage various tribes by playing one against the other. Now, it’s no longer enough to be a tribe getting along with other tribes– we must become a NATION!
What do Palestine, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka all have in common besides ongoing ethnic conflict? All former British colonies. Coincidence?
DJ- You left out India, Japan, Canada, the United States, Hong Kong, South Africa, Australia… Not every former colony is a wreck.
Japan was a former British colony? That’ll be news to them…
But seriously, let’s look at that list. India: barely a unified nation, with tens of thousands of deaths by terrorist attack every year. South Africa: only recently pulled out of its mess. Hong Kong might be the only exception.
As for U.S., Canada, and Australia, let’s look at the status of their colonized indigenous people. But those weren’t colonies, in the sense of ruling another ethnic group, they were extensions of Britain into which Brits poured and dominated (and in some cases intentionally tried to eliminate the former occupants).
Hmmmm… I always thought Afrikaners were Dutch.
Yep. Then they fought a war against Britain. And lost.