I don’t believe that what we see before our eyes is the reality. In politics that means, We don’t know the half of it. If you think that what’s taking place in the councils of the president is represented directly in the press, you’re deluded. Great crises pass with little more than a groan from the president. This would seem to be the lesson of all those conferences that Kennedy-era policymakers have on the Cuban missile crisis, when they disclose new and horrifying details about how close the world came to war. It is the lesson of the last presidential race, which from a foreign-policy standpoint was all about Israel/Palestine/Iran, and the words were never mentioned by the mainstream media.
This is the only basis on which I might halfway-forgive Obama, and along with him the new progressive Israel Lobby, their silence on the Gaza massacre and Israel’s relentless expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Here is my fantasy. Some day there is a conference at Harvard about the Obama presidency. Thirty years from now– god willing I am still watching CSpan over my lunch of leftovers, and there is one democratic state called Israstein. Or Pasreal. Old bald Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod are talking about how close the world came to coming off the rails in 2009. And they finally tell us about Obama’s meetings with Netanyahu. Netanyahu was belligerent and out of control. He lost his temper and talked to Obama like a student. He spoke about it being 1938 all over again, he spoke about using nuclear weapons against Iran. They left the meeting shaken and wondering what he might do, to bathe the Middle East in fire, and wondering what power we had to prevent it.
That’s the only way I can understand the complete collapse on Goldstone, Gaza, human rights, and the demolition of Palestinian homes. They are actually afraid of Netanyahu. They are trying to dial everything down to stave off a world war. And keep some factions of the Is-lob with them.
A blogger in the audience asks, "Why didn’t you say anything about this at the time? Didn’t the public have a right to know? Might that have given the U.S. more power in dealing with a government that was tyrannizing its minority population and the Israel lobby in the U.S.?"
Axelrod and Emanuel look at one another goofily. "We never thought about that."
Just a theory, anyway. And no, I don’t really forgive them.
