Brilliant post. Steve Walt, the realist advocate for the prudent uses of American power, who is the best hope that the two-state-solution today possesses in the U.S., says the U.S. should break the blockade with an international flotilla. He touches on my point that it’s not a humanitarian problem when he says we’d have to deal with Hamas. We should deal with Hamas. We talked to all the folks who resisted the U.S. occupation in Iraq, we are talking to the Taliban now. Double standard/Helen Thomas.
Note that Walt’s post says not one word about the lobby. Till the last line (not in this excerpt), when he says that there’s not a snowball’s chance of hell of our following such a wise course. Who will give Walt some backup on this? Andrew Sullivan, Peter Beinart? Where is the new left-center in the American discourse? J Street? Can the alternative lobby speak out for Palestinian suffering in a real way.
why doesn’t the United States use its considerable power to lift the blockade of Gaza unilaterally? It’s clear that the blockade of Gaza is causing enormous human suffering and making both the United States and Israel look terrible in the eyes of the rest of the world. It has also failed to achieve any positive political purpose, like defeating Hamas. So why doesn’t the United States take the bull by the horns and organize a relief flotilla of its own, and use the U.S. Navy to escort the ships into Gaza? I’ll bet we could easily get a few NATO allies to help too, and if money’s the issue, we can get some EU members or Scandinavians to help pay for the relief supplies. And somehow I don’t think the IDF would try to stop us, or board any of the vessels.
The advantages of this course of action seem obvious. The United States has been looking both ineffective and hypocritical ever since the Cairo speech a year ago, and many people in the Arab and Islamic world are beginning to see Barack Obama as just a smooth-talking version of George W. Bush.
