The same is true in the Arab world, where the lackluster Palestinian leadership agreed, reportedly at U.S. urging, to shelve the Goldstone report that charged Israel, and to a lesser extent Hamas, with war crimes during the Israeli invasion of Gaza Strip last December 

“While much attention has been paid to the feud between the (rightist) Fox News Channel and the White House, the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from... progressive hosts on MSNBC (a popular TV channel) who are using their nightly news-and-views-cast to measure what (Rachel Maddow, a liberal host) calls ‘the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions’,” The New York Times observed last Monday.

The paper continued: “While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about health care, civil liberties and other issues.”

The same is true in the Arab world, where the lackluster Palestinian leadership agreed, reportedly at U.S. urging, to shelve the Goldstone report that charged Israel, and to a lesser extent Hamas, with war crimes during the Israeli invasion of Gaza Strip last December.

The naive Palestinian expectation was apparently that the Obama administration would reciprocate by coming up with an Israeli concession, but the situation became more intolerable when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described a partial Israeli freeze on continued colonization in occupied West Bank and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians from the occupied East Jerusalem as “unprecedented.”

Consequently, the frustrated Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, unexpectedly announced in retaliation that he would not run for election next January - a step that could cripple future Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.

This first bombshell was followed by another, when Palestinian Authority’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, revealed that they are about to unilaterally declare a Palestinian state before the U.N. Security Council and invite international recognition of it.

 This seemingly comforting U.S. reaction should reassure the Palestinians that once again President Barack Obama will come to their rescue in another resounding speech from a high platform 

The Israeli reaction was unbelievable; Israel threatened to occupy more land, which coincided with racist comments by various pro-Israel U.S. groups in the wake of the inexplicable and deplorable massacre at Fort Hood, a Texas army base, of 12 soldiers and a civilian earlier this month by Major Nidal Hasan, an American-born Muslim psychiatrist.

All those who prefer to stir the pot ought to recall the savageness of one of their own, Baruch Goldstein, an American-born Israeli physician, a follower of the infamous racist rabbi Meir Kahane, who gunned down 29 Palestinians and wounded 150 others while praying in a mosque in Hebron in 1994.

In line with the Israeli government’s defiant line vis-à-vis freezing expansion of Jewish housing in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Jerusalem municipal planning committee has approved the construction of 900 new housing units for Jews in the city’s Gilo neighborhood.

The American response was disappointingly lukewarm. Expressing “dismay” at the decision, a White House statement said “these actions make it more difficult for our (peace) efforts to succeed. Neither party should engage in efforts or take actions that could unilaterally preempt, or appear to preempt, negotiations” between Palestinians and Israelis. “The U.S. also objects to other Israeli practices in Jerusalem related to housing, including the continuing pattern of evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes,” was another statement.

This seemingly comforting U.S. reaction should reassure the Palestinians that once again President Barack Obama will come to their rescue in another resounding speech from a high platform. But the Palestinians and other Arab leaders are already looking for other avenues, primarily Turkey, which has of late taken a major role in expanding relations with its neighbors.

European leaders, especially French President Nicolas Sarkozy, must be aware that Obama’s high-sounding oratory has yet to show any results.

“The deadlock in which we find ourselves today is extremely worrying,” the French president told a Saudi paper ahead of his arrival on Tuesday in Riyadh for a meeting with Saudi King Abdullah. Earlier this month, he had meetings in Paris with the leaders of Iraq, Israel and Syria; the French president is believed to be pursuing the idea of France hosting an international peace conference which will include the United States.

If Obama still hopes to steer the peace course fairly and squarely towards a Palestinian-Israeli settlement and not allow Sarkozy to pull the rug from underneath his feet, it is high time that he become more proactive. He ought to be aware that he should not allow Israel to call the shots, as it has been so far, or else Israel’s growing number of opponents are bound to attempt more persuasive, if not bloody, measures.




*Published in Jordan's THE JORDAN TIMES on Nov. 21, 2009.