Opinion Editorials, June 2009

Obama and Palestine:

Commentary on the Cairo Speech

By Adib S. Kawar

ccun.org, June 9, 2009

The newly elected President, Barak Hussein Obama, the first of non white European roots to be elected for the post of president of the United State America. President Obama’s second topic in his speech he handled during his short visit to the Arab homeland in the University of Cairo as he declared was addressed to the Islamic world was about Palestine and the Zionist entity. President Obama said (to avoid omissions of important points in his speech I take the liberty to quote this section about the Palestinian cause reading:

1.      “The second major source of tension that we need to discuss is the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world. “America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied. “Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction - or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews - is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve. “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own. “For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive. It is easy to point fingers - for Palestinians to point to the displacement brought by Israel's founding, and for Israelis to point to the constant hostility and attacks throughout its history from within its borders as well as beyond. But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security. “That is in Israel's interest, Palestine's interest, America's interest, and the world's interest. That is why I intend to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience that the task requires. The obligations that the parties have agreed to under the Road Map are clear. For peace to come, it is time for them - and all of us - to live up to our responsibilities. “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. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered. “Now is the time for Palestinians to focus on what they can build. The Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern, with institutions that serve the needs of its people. Hamas does have support among some Palestinians, but they also have responsibilities. To play a role in fulfilling Palestinian aspirations, and to unify the Palestinian people, Hamas must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, and recognize Israel's right to exist. “At the same time, Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel's right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine's. The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop. “Israel must also live up to its obligations to ensure that Palestinians can live, and work, and develop their society. And just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel's security; neither does the continuing lack of opportunity in the West Bank. Progress in the daily lives of the Palestinian people must be part of a road to peace, and Israel must take concrete steps to enable such progress. Finally, the Arab States must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities. The Arab-Israeli conflict should no longer be used to distract the people of Arab nations from other problems. Instead, it must be a cause for action to help the Palestinian people develop the institutions that will sustain their state; to recognize Israel's legitimacy; and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past. “America will align our policies with those who pursue peace, and say in public what we say in private to Israelis and Palestinians and Arabs. We cannot impose peace. But privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away. Likewise, many Israelis recognize the need for a Palestinian state. It is time for us to act on what everyone knows to be true. “Too many tears have flowed. Too much blood has been shed. All of us have a responsibility to work for the day when the mothers of Israelis and Palestinians can see their children grow up without fear; when the Holy Land of three great faiths is the place of peace that God intended it to be; when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims, and a place for all of the children of Abraham to mingle peacefully together as in the story of Isra, when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed (peace be upon them) joined in prayer.”

We have to admit without reservation that never before an American president was coragious enough to give some credit or be fair to a certain extent to the Palestinian cause, but this doesn’t mean that we still have few importent points that, with his permission, that we have to be critical about.

President Obama as we read above started this part of his speech saying: “America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable. It is based upon cultural and historical ties, and the recognition that the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”, but we cannot avoid to point his kind attention that, it is a well known fact that what President Obama considers “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”  is the cause of our sufferings as Palestinians and the rest of the  Arab nation. The United state had been giving such efforts and sacrifices by giving priority in support of the “Zionist cause” most of the time over its own citizen’s interests. The United states bonds with “Israel” since day one of its life, are well known from the beginning and before this state was established. Tremendous efforts by western colonialism starting, but not ending with the British and French Sykes-Picot Agreement : 16 May 1916 « The Great War” to be followed by the British The Balfour Declaration issued in 1917, both well known by anybody with a limited knowledge about Arab causes and tragedies, concluded and given by foreign powers the troops of which were not even occupying this Arab land yet, were fundamental and basic in the establishment and continuity of the Zionist state of Israel, all without consideration to the interest and rights of the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. Would the old western heritage be sustained as per Noam Chomsky’s prediction,  he wrote in his article dated June 05, 2009 entitled “Keeping just to Israel-Palestine” (Information ClearingHouse) – “…there was nothing substantive about anything else -- Obama called on Arabs and Israelis not to 'point fingers' at each other or to 'see this conflict only from one side or the other.'  The Grim Picture of Obama's Middle East ”There is, however, a third side, that of the United States, which has played a decisive role in sustaining the current conflict. Obama gave no indication that its role should change or even be considered. And proceeded to say: “Those familiar with the history will rationally conclude, then, that Obama will continue in the path of unilateral U.S. rejectionism.”

1.    Patrick Martin wrote in his article “Obama in Cairo: A New Face for Imperialism” of June 05, 2009 "WSW" (Information ClearingHouse) – “The speech delivered by US President Barack Obama in Cairo yesterday was riddled with contradictions. He declared his opposition to the “killing of innocent men, women, and children,” but defended the ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US proxy war in Pakistan, while remaining silent on the most recent Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. These wars have killed at least one million Iraqis and tens of thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.” We wait to see President Obama  enforcing an end to the Zionist state’s war crimes and crimes against humanity, that the great American democracy appointed itself to prevent, and enforce its form of “democracy”, while these crimes had been committed the United States had been excusing this criminal state for on the bases of “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied.”  President Obama was kind enough to realize that “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations…” But President Obama who is aware of the 61 years long Palestinian and other Arab sufferings, and I am sure that the Zionist state that he gives the right to exist had been expending and continuously waging one war to be followed by others, but President Obama denies Palestinians the right of resisting occupation and what goes along with it by saying: “Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance (At least the new president used the tem resistance and not as usual in the west and of course by Zionists who calls resistance “terrorism!”) through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.”  We grant ourselves the permission to ask the wise president, what else other than armed resistance liberated and expelled Zionist occupation of Lebanon in the years 2000 and 2006, and what forced this rogue state to withdraw from the occupied Gaza Strip few years ago after years of occupation and the colonization of this little poor strip of land, and prevented the return of Zionist occupation to the strip early this year. We are not addressing a dumb president like ex-president Bush, we are addressing a clever young man to tell us how to liberate an occupied land that the occupier gives himself the right to do so on the claim of a divine promise and because he was persecuted in some faraway place or places.

2.        

3.       President Barak H. Obama said: “Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful.” With which we fully and without doubt agree, the writer of these words used to see at the end of WW II newsreels  shot after the defeat of Nazi Germany in concentration camps showing walking skeletons which is still alive in my memory, but unfortunately these same pictures had been and are being taken as an excuse to commit a never ending Palestinian holocaust that is called in Hebrew the “shoe”. The last scenes of this “play” as still being performed in the biggest open air prison in the world, namely the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Would president Obama permit us to remind him that there are over ten million Palestinians about half of them are rutting and suffering in the living holocaust guarded by survivors of the Nazi holocaust or their descendents, in occupied Palestine, and the rest of them, who President Obama shares with Zionists the denial of their rights to return to their homes and land (what he calls the Jewish state), the Palestinian Arab homeland, because as he said in endorsement to the Zionist claim as expressed by the President “the aspiration for a Jewish homeland is rooted in a tragic history that cannot be denied”. A living example of uprooted Palestinians is myself, even though I was born in Palestine in a home that was stolen along with the rest  of Palestine by those holocaust survivors and other Zionists to accommodate themselves in. Somebody should have asked the president while visiting the chancler of the Federal Republic of Germany, Angela Merkel, why not allow the victims of the old German Nazi regime to go back to their German homeland along with other lands that are their homelands, though many Palestinians call for a Palestinian democratic state for Arabs and non-Zionist Jews.

4.     

President Obama continued to say: “On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people - Muslims and Christians - have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations - large and small - that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.” But as we can read here Obama failed to tell us what shall be done with those Palestinians, including myself, who for more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the … neighboring lands…”  Noting that this is while the Zionist movement is creating Jews of doubtful religious roots. Among the million or so Russians imported into occupied Palestine there are about three hundred thousand Christians and Moslems who pray in churches and Mosques, and are buried in their own graveyards!!! Were these non-Jews also persecuted by their compatriots belonging to the same religious faiths they are members of.