Clinton is also coming from the Old Testament

Mostafa Zein

They say in the United States that President Barack Obama, who promised change domestically, and an improvement in America’s image abroad, has begun to discover the difficulty of realizing his promises. The revolt against firmly-entrenched imperialist traditions is more difficult that he expected, even if the revolt meets the popular desire that brought him to the White House.

Immediately upon taking office, Obama ran up against the guardians of the temple, who are materially and spiritually linked to the oil, drug and weapons firms. He has been unable to pass his health care program, which is very popular in the United States. He has not dared stop the war in Afghanistan. The decision to withdraw from Iraq was in the interest of the war in Kabul.

The test in the Middle East has been the most difficult one. Obama promised the Palestinians a state within two years. He stressed the importance of freezing settlements on the West Bank because they are the principle obstacle to peace. Everyone thought that he had put his finger on the wound, and that the peaceful beginning would certainly bear fruit. His rhetorical ability covered his practical measures inside his administration. He appointed the Israeli Rahm Emmanuel as White House chief of staff. He named Dennis Ross as an advisor. Tasking George Mitchell with Ross’ tasks, based on his experience in achieving peace in Ireland, turned out to be mere deception of the Palestinians and the Arabs.

The President returned to White House tradition. He became convinced of Netanyahu’s point of view. In the first clash between them, Obama abandoned the condition that settlements be frozen before negotiations begin. His defeat at the hands of Netanyahu and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, was thunderous. He began to pressure the Palestinians to give up their rights before beginning negotiations. Netanyahu, who was victorious over the emperor, found no embarrassment in enshrining this victory. He affirmed before Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that the construction of 3,000 housing units would continue. Settlement in Jerusalem would be subject to no bargaining. The lady supported him. And she went further. She said that, historically, he was right. Of course, she was talking about the biblical promise, and not about a people that has lived in Jerusalem for centuries and become part of its soil and air. The promise was about history, and the truth, not about people who made history.

The woman went from Jerusalem to Morocco, where she met with Arab foreign ministers, trying to gain their support against the Palestinians (there are precedents) so that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ team would accept Netanyahu’s ideas, and her historical vision. She will try to convince them that the condition of halting settlements is out of place, since negotiations will be about final status issues, i.e. borders, Jerusalem and the holy places, and refugees. Naturally, she will try to market her administration’s backpedaling before Netanyahu as a victory for peace, since he accepted the idea of sitting down to negotiate.

We would like to hear Clinton say in Morocco what Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, told her in Washington when he rejected the White House’s call for diplomatic openness to Israel in order to encourage it to resume peace negotiations: “We can only suggest normalization. If we do that before recovering occupied Arab land, we will lose the only card we have.” Perhaps he added: if the Arabs and Abbas accept Netanyahu’s request, the result will certainly be more inter-Palestinian division and a separation between the people and the Palestinian Authority. This is a magic recipe for a civil war, which does not require more than this to break out.

Clinton came from a position of modernity, with a superstitious biblical fable. How can we believe her promises and those of her president?

*Published in the London-based AL-HAYAT on Nov. 3, 2009.