An off-the-record New Year conversation with President Obama
By Alan Hart
Q: Mr. President, I’d like to begin this conversation with a quote from a recent article by Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times. He wrote: “The only thing standing between Israel and national suicide any more is America and its willingness to tell Israel the truth.” If you were free to speak your mind to Israel, I mean Israel’s Jews, what would be your message?
A: I would tell them that no president, including this one, can save them from the policies and actions of their own leaders.
Q: What is it in particular that you think they need to be “saved” from?
A: (The president smiled). The short answer is Netanyahu, those to the right of him and the Zionist colonial ideology they represent. The long answer has to take account of this fact. If Israel continues on its present course, gobbling up more and more of the land and water resources of the occupied West Bank, there will come a time when the Palestinians of Greater Israel will outnumber its Jews. They and their leaders will then have a choice of three options.
Q: What are they?
A: One is for the Jewish minority of Greater Israel to rule the Palestinian Arab majority by repression. That would create a full-blown version of apartheid, similar to the old South African system but far worse than it.
Q: What you think the consequences of that would be?
A: As happened in South Africa’s case, the world, governments as well as peoples, would eventually say to Greater Israel “Enough is enough”, and it would be subjected to sanctions applied globally.
Q: Are you suggesting that in this scenario you can see a day coming when America, even America, would become part of a global effort to sanction apartheid Greater Israel?
A: Yes. I think there would come a time when a majority of Americans were outraged enough to insist that Congress and their president acted.
Q: Is your assumption that the imposition of global sanctions (or even a credible threat of them) would bring a majority of Israeli Jews to their senses and cause them to insist that their leaders seriously addressed the Palestinian claim and need for justice?
A: It is not an assumption. It’s a hope.
Q: But there could be a downside, Mr. President. Sanctions could be counter-productive. They could have the effect of reinforcing in the minds of brainwashed Israeli Jews the belief that they had no choice but to tell the world to go to hell and do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain their iron grip on Palestine that became Israel.
A: That’s a possibility.
Q: What is another option for an Israel determined to stay on its present course?
A: Simply stated it is to defuse the ticking demographic time-bomb of occupation by creating a pretext for a final round of ethnic cleansing, to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank into Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and beyond.
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