Never before has an American President’s fear of offending the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress been so exposed as it was by Obama’s decision to veto the Security Council resolution condemning continued, illegal Israeli settlement activities on the occupied West Bank and demanding that Israel “immediately and completely cease” all such activities. In a different America – an informed America – some might think, I do, that Obama should be impeached. The charge? TREASON.
For decades, and despite much rhetoric to the contrary, American-led Western policy has been to prefer Arab dictatorship (authoritarianism in various forms) to Arab democracy. This preference was determined by two main assessments.
For many years I believed that Israel’s leaders have no equals in the business of saying one thing and doing another. But Mubarak has proved me wrong. He went on television to tell Egyptians that he would be staying on for some months because only he could restore stability and set the stage for it to continue after he stepped down. Hours later his thugs were leading a violent attack on the peaceful, pro-democracy protesters in Cairo’s Tahir square.
If more and more Arabs breach the wall of fear that has prevented them for decades from demanding their rights, expressing their rage at the corruption and repression of their governments and at regime impotence in the face of Israel’s arrogance of power, there’s one question above all others America’s policy makers will have to ask themselves. Who do we need most if America’s own real interests are to be best protected – the Arabs or Israel? And that, of course, begs the mother and father of all questions for them: Is Israel our most valuable ally in the region or our biggest liability?
The most sickening (I mean truly vomit inducing) thing about the Al Jazeera revelations, the so-called Palestine Papers, is not what they confirm about the quisling status of the impotent and corrupt Palestine Authority. Nor is it what they confirm about the Israeli leadership’s complete lack of interest in peace on terms other than those which require the Palestinians to surrender – to abandon their struggle for even an acceptable minimum amount of justice. What then is the most sickening thing?
