Obama, Change and the future of Palestinian State
It was June 4th 2009, just 2 years ago, when President Barack Obama stood in front of thousands of academics, politicians and others in Cairo University addressing the Muslim world. Beyond the fact that he had taken priority in addressing the deteriorating relations between the United States and Muslim World, he made a comment, which had never been made by any Western power. He said, “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end.” In addition to the usual rhetoric of calling the Palestinians out on using violence (while ignoring Israel’s common bombardment of Palestinian territories), he compared the situation of the Palestinians under Israel to that of the Black slaves in America. Later on in his administration he continued to criticize Israel’s constant unilateral decisions to expand settlements and said several times that the United States does not recognize them (again something NEVER stated openly by any American administration).
So what happened? Israel’s hawkish Netanyahu not only disregarded anything Obama said but went further on to lecturing the President on how he needs to change his policy. Netanyahu then went to the US Congress to ask them for support when the President and him could not come an agreement. Disturbingly Congress decided to side with Netanyahu rather than their own President. Obama, now powerless, began presenting his speeches the way he would if he were speaking to AIPIAC (Israeli Lobby) and thus reversing any progress that had already been made. He became what ex-President Bush already was—a capitalist that bails out companies who irresponsibly wrecked the economy and caused a worldwide recession, supporting Israel even when they are blatantly wrong, and generally giving rationalism up for pressure (read The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt).
So this is where we are. Where do we go from here? That’s a difficult question to answer. However, at this point we can at least discontinue peacefully repressing our anger and simply hoping that upcoming elections and a personality change in the executive will change conditions. We also know that things are changing, and they are changing fast. The Muslim World is becoming more democratic and they are flexing their muscle (Egypt, for example, removed its own version of the apartheid wall that Mubarak had put in place to prevent Palestinian movement). We are also facing the prospect of a post-capitalist society or at the very least a significant reformation of both the financial and political institution because bailouts and tough words have failed to achieve anything except the greater fear that an even worse disaster will inevitably come about.
Karl Marx, the founder of Communism, had an interesting slogan that he often promoted in his several texts: “workers of the world unite”. He said that unless and until the workers who had worked in such miserable conditions realize that they are being exploited and that the conditions under which they have been forced into (work 18 hours a day in order to survive or not work and face risk of death) could be changed; they will continue to suffer horribly. We can all learn from this idea of raising consciousness among people of the unethical, exploitable and greed driven machine under which they live in. This approach is often undervalued because it is seen as overly passive. However, it should be noted that through that very approach Communism (and variations of it) had expanded and been established in the USSR, China, Eastern Europe and in other places all over the world. You the reader have already reached the first point of emancipating society from this system by being aware of it and what it is doing.
Zamir Rimaz
