Obama sheepish about Israeli ethnic cleansing?
As the euphoria dies down and Obama starts work as President of America, we'll be waiting in vain to hear from him about Israeli aggression in Gaza. Since the days of Plan Dalet, Israel has been pursuing a policy of ethnic cleansing, in the open, in front of the US, the UK, the UN and every major international power. It has done so with the military support of the US and countless blind eyes from everyone else.
What an excellent chance for Obama to state the case against the aggressive, illegal, expansionist policies of Israel. And yet, while he found time to tell the Israeli paper Haaretz that he was a staunch supporter of Israel, he didn't find time to condemn the wholesale slaughter of Palestinian families during the Israeli invasion, yet again, of Gaza. More than a thousand Palestinian dead, the vast majority innocent families, following airstrikes on schools, hospitals, housing areas, and even the UN mission and yet all Obama can find to say is that he's a stauch supporter of Israel.
It doesn't take much thinking to understand why he was so reluctant to oppose rampant aggressive militarism on the part of Israel. American politics has a very strong Jewish lobby and every national politician has to beware stepping on their toes. Not only will they automatically be accused of being anti-Semitic if they dare to criticise Israel, but they may even be tarred with the brush of denying the Holocaust. In America, it is still almost impossible to criticise Israel without these accusations.
That's been a conscious strategy of Israel for many years as a means of deflecting attention away from their militaristic expansion while they dispossess the Palestinians, and it plays on the guilt of nations who turned a blind eye to what happened in Germany in the 30s until it was too late.
Now those guilty consciences are being ruthlessly exploited to enable Israel to bomb civilian areas at will, to expand and occupy Palestinian territory and to pursue a policy of ethnic cleansing under the noses of the western powers. Every news report from Israel including from the BBC portrays Israel as the victim. Even while Israel was negotiating a ceasefire, they were still bombing.
It wasn't so long ago that the UK government claimed to refuse to negotiate with terrorists who bomb and maim whilst pretending to negotiate. It's hard to see the difference between that position with respect to the IRA, and the present situation with respect to Israel. Israel is spreading terror throughout Palestine to frighten the population into ceding its land as it's been doing since 1948.
If Obama could have dared to risk the hostility of the American Jewish lobby, he might have said something in support of the aid supplies, ending the isolation of Gaza, countering the Israeli brutality, and he might even have used the right word, ethnic cleansing to describe what's happening. But then he'd have to also acknowledge the trillions of dollars fed to the Israeli military machine by the US. Turning a blind eye in day one is not a good omen.
We'll see what he turns out like - but in the US it's one dollar one vote and powerful lobbies talk with money. It'll take more than a few flags and large crowds to change that. His attitude to Israel will be just like Bush - I'd be very happy to be proved wrong but my guess is that as far as the US is concerned, Israel can carry on its ethnic cleansing with impunity.
