Amazing piece by the great Uri Avnery at antiwar.com, praying that Obama will ignore the Israel lobby and turn to the peace camp in Israel. 3 shattering excerpts, all emphases mine:
Obama, on his part, has gone out of his way to show that he would support
the Israeli government exactly as his predecessors have. He groveled in the
dust before AIPAC. He surrounded himself with Bill Clinton's Jewish aides and
hinted that they would enjoy the same status in his future administration.
But go and believe a candidate's election promises. They are worth as much
as a garlic's skin, as we say in Hebrew....
This is also Jack Ross's view. Then there's this fabulous take on Camp David:
Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, another great friend of Israel, helped Ehud
Barak after Camp David to spread the lie that "I have turned every stone,
offered them everything they wanted, Arafat has rejected all my generous offers,
we have no partner for peace." This mantra dealt a tremendous blow to
the Israeli peace camp, from which it has not recovered to this day. At the
same time the settlements were being enlarged at a frantic pace, with the knowledge
and tacit approval of the Clinton administration. And no wonder: under Clinton,
all matters pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were in the hands
of a group of Jewish Zionists. There was not a single Arab around.
True true true. Dan Kurtzer said this too; let us have diversity at last in our negotiating team! Yes, and what about our journalist team? And finally, everyone says Jerusalem is peripheral, it's not:
When Obama and his people – and I hope that they will be new people, not the
wrecks from the Clinton era – examine this subject, they will be compelled
to arrive at a self-evident conclusion: that the hatred for the U.S. that is
boiling from Morocco to Pakistan is inextricably bound up with the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. This is what has poisoned all the wells.
I think the most important thing – maybe even more important than the policies he pursues – is that Obama scares the living $#!# out of the Zio-hawks.
The symbolic repudiation alone will be resound far more deeply than most of us realize right now.
I think Obama's policies will be slightly more liberal than Clinton's but not much.
I expect that translates into an overlap of people, rather than a "clean break".
Obama will be the boss though (assuming that he wins today).
And, at the least, his persona and policies are likely to be light grey to Bush's very dark grey.
Averny is a zionist.
Haaretz seems to have joined the anti-Obama movement. I received an email from them denouncing his candidacy. This sounds like the zionists are really afraid of him.
When asked by a journalist on french TV how he is going to improve the image of America in the world, Obama answered:
"It starts by bringing this war in Irak to a close. As long as we maintain an occupation in Irak it's gonna be hard for people to focus on other things. It's important for us to close gitmo and restore due process in how we're handling those prisoners.
What I'd like to do is to commit a summit in the muslim world that calls all muslim leaders together to have a discussion about how we can prevent the widening misunderstandings and gaps between the muslim world and the West."
guess what the conclusion of that will be!
http://www.canalplus.fr/c-infos-documentaires/pid1830-c-zapping.html
(04/11/08 at 1 minute)
If I were chosing the American negotiating team, I'd have a very simple rule:
"NO JEWS, NO ARABS!"
The howls of protest from APIAC and friends would be amusing to say the least. As would the sight of the Israeli leadership shitting its pants in fear. What would an objective American negotiating team discover on its trips to the West Bank and the solution it might subsequently propose?
Of course I'm dreaming – Obama will be an APIAC glove puppet, just like every other President since Eisenhower.