Only in Haaretz. Rashid Khalidi becomes a lightning rod figure in the presidential race, he is smeared up and down our printing presses, and who does a piece debriefing him on the business? Akiva Eldar. Wow. Eldar says that Khalidi was "disappointed" with the Obama campaign, even as he supported it. A few points. On Obama and the lobby:
publicly opposed to the occupation and critical of U.S. policy is
grounds for public defamation as a 'terrorist.' It attests to the
survival of McCarthyite tendencies in the U.S. media and politics. It
also reaffirmed that Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians specifically are
still the 'other' in American society. A higher percentage of
Arab-Americans voted for Obama than any other ethnic group besides
African-Americans, and they voted in record numbers too, I believe, and
yet they are still pushed aside, almost literally. For instance, two
Arab-American women in hijab were removed from the camera's gaze at one
of Obama's rallies during the election. Obama did not visit one mosque
or Arab community center throughout the entire two-year campaign, and
he never mentioned Arab- or Muslim-Americans in his speeches. Whatever
may have been the 'strategic' political reasons for these actions, they
show the kind of atmosphere we in the U.S. live in.
"This
situation is linked to the problematic notion that it is acceptable to
create a U.S. Middle East policy which caters to Israel – and
specifically to the Israeli right – and to the concerns of powerful
forces like the Israel lobby that are allied to the Israeli right, but
hardly at all to Arab- and Muslim-Americans."
Khalidi says we have a de facto one-state solution. May be too late, and Obama won't spend the political capital needed to get two. I particularly like this, aimed at Dennis Ross et al:
into the mess they are in via a deeply flawed negotiating process, and
a cowardly refusal to confront occupation and settlement head-on when
it would have been far easier to do in the 1980s and 1990s, do not
deserve another chance to ruin the future of the peoples of this
region."
Because let us never forget: Bill Clinton ran in favor of the settlements in '92. That is the Stephen Douglas/Kansas/Nebraska of this hateful process: the ways that our country has favored a criminal and brutal occupation. And why? (Thanks to Rupa Shah)
