Jimmy Carter, the former US president, Nobel laureate and founder of the Carter Centre, was conspicuously absent from the podium at the national Democratic conventions in 2008 and 2012, at which Barack Obama was nominated by the party for the US presidency. Reasonable speculation for Carter's absence is that Obama felt Carter's presence might be harmful to his election, or re-election, because of his very public views on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, views that are not popular with influential members of the Democratic Party and its most important contributors. Whether the snubbing of Carter was a matter of pure political calculation, or whether Obama is genuinely hostile to Carter's views, is an open question. What Obama's views really are, his perception of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and understanding of the history of the conflict, will be examined in this article. Speaking to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on 4 June 2008, the day after receiving the Democratic nomination for president, Obama said the following: “Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds. “The story made a powerful impression on me. I had grown up without a sense of roots. My father was black; he was from Kenya, and he left us when I was two. My mother was white; she was from Kansas, and I'd moved with her to Indonesia and then back to Hawaii. In many ways, I didn't know where I came from. “So I was drawn to the belief that you could sustain a spiritual, emotional and cultural identity. And I deeply understood the Zionist idea — that there is always a homeland at the centre of our story. I also learned about the horror of the Holocaust, and the terrible urgency it brought to the journey home to Israel.” Obama then talks about his great-uncle, who served in the US 89th Infantry Division, the first Americans to reach a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. They liberated Ohrdruf, part of Buchenwald, in April 1945. “When the Americans marched in, they discovered huge piles of dead bodies and starving survivors,” Obama said. “I saw some of those very images at Yad Vashem, and they never leave you … It was just a few years after the liberation of the camps that David Ben-Gurion declared the founding of the Jewish State of Israel. “We know that the establishment of Israel was just and necessary, rooted in centuries of struggle and decades of patient work. But 60 years later, we know that we cannot relent, we cannot yield, and as president I will never compromise when it comes to Israel's security. “Not when there are still voices that deny the Holocaust. Not when there are terrorist groups and political leaders committed to Israel's destruction. Not when there are maps across the Middle East that don't even acknowledge Israel's existence, and government-funded textbooks filled with hatred toward Jews. Not when there are rockets raining down on Sderot, and Israeli children have to take a deep breath and summon uncommon courage every time they board a bus or walk to school.” “I have long understood Israel's quest for peace and need for security. But never more so than during my travels there two years ago. Flying in an [Israeli Defence Force] helicopter, I saw a narrow and beautiful strip of land nestled against the Mediterranean. On the ground, I met a family who saw their house destroyed by a Katyusha rocket. “I spoke to Israeli troops who faced daily threats as they maintained security near the blue line … Hamas now controls Gaza. Hezbollah has tightened its grip on southern Lebanon, and is flexing its muscles in Beirut. Because of the war in Iraq, Iran, which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq, is emboldened and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation. Iraq is unstable, and Al-Qaida has stepped up its recruitment. Israel's quest for peace with its neighbors has stalled, despite the heavy burdens borne by the Israeli people. “Those who threaten Israel threaten us. Israel has always faced these threats on the front lines. And I will bring to the White House an unshakeable commitment to Israel's security. That starts with ensuring Israel's qualitative military advantage. I will ensure that Israel can defend itself from any threat — from Gaza to Tehran. “Defence cooperation between the United States and Israel is a model of success, and must be deepened. As president, I will implement a memorandum of understanding that provides $30 billion in assistance to Israel over the next decade — investments to Israel's security that will not be tied to any other nation. “First, we must approve the foreign aid request for 2009. Going forward, we can enhance our cooperation on missile defence. We should export military equipment to our ally Israel under the same guidelines as NATO. And I will always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself in the United Nations and around the world. “We must isolate Hamas unless and until they renounce terrorism, recognise Israel's right to exist, and abide by past agreements. There is no room at the negotiating table for terrorist organisations. That is why I opposed holding elections in 2006 with Hamas on the ballot. Let me be clear. Israel's security is sacrosanct. “It is non-negotiable .… any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognised and defensible borders. Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” In this impassioned speech, Obama managed to hit all the talking points of Israel's state propaganda, and it could just as well have been written by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's speechwriter. It includes the centuries-long yearning of Jews to “return” to a homeland, which, though a widespread belief and a persistent theme of Zionist ideology and propaganda, is nonetheless a complete myth; the horror of the Holocaust, which, though not at all a myth, is invoked constantly by the State of Israel to justify its existence. In fact, this repetitive invocation of a threat of another Holocaust even began in 1948 in the midst of the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people by the Jewish army, even though it was the Palestinians who were facing a Holocaust, not the Jews; the insidious threat of the “terrorist group” Hamas, which “seeks Israel's destruction” along with Al-Qaida, Iran, and Hezbollah, the latter “tightening its grip on Lebanon”; the rockets fired from the Gaza Strip “raining down on Sderot” with the danger to Israeli school children transiting to and from school, and, lastly, government-funded textbooks across the Middle East that teach “hatred toward Jews.” Obama announces that he will appropriate $30 billion in grants to Israel over the next ten years. There is also the suggestion in the speech that the reason he voted against the Iraq War as a senator during the Bush administration was because regime change in Baghdad would strengthen Iran. As he said, “Iran, which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq, is emboldened and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation.” In other words, Obama opposed the Iraq War for the sake of Israel. He refers to flying over Israel, as had George Bush before him, and observing that “narrow strip of land” with the implication that the strip of land is too narrow. And of course, “any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognised and defensible borders.” The requirement that any agreement with the Palestinians must “recognise Israel as a Jewish state' was enunciated six years prior to the injection of this requirement into the “peace talks” by Netanyahu. Possibly Obama and Netanyahu mean two different things by “Jewish state.” However, one wonders whether Netanyahu did not review Obama's speech before introducing this new requirement for a settlement with the Palestinians in order to assess American receptivity before adding a requirement that most observers believe would be impossible for the Palestinians to accept, though one apparently embraced by the American president. Equally, saying that Jerusalem must remain Israel's undivided capital is very much in line with the persistent refrain of the Israeli prime minister and another principle that the Palestinian leadership could not possibly accept. This claim that Jerusalem must be the undivided capital of Israel flies in the face of previous American policy, as upheld by every American president since 1967, and it is in direct contradiction to UN Security Council Resolution 242, the basis of the American position since the 1967 War, at least up until the Obama administration, whose support for this principle is either weak or nonexistent. It also runs in contradiction to UN General Assembly Resolution 184 upon which Israel claims its international legitimacy. That resolution set aside Jerusalem as an UN-administrated area that was neither a part of the Jewish or Arab states.
Extreme positions: There is not much that the president-elect left out, if his purpose was to appease the Zionists and capture the Jewish vote in the upcoming election. Any Palestinian listening to the speech must have been horrified: Obama had taken the most extreme hardline Israeli positions. Whether these words actually reflected his personal understanding of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and a just solution to it, or whether he was acting politically with the primary goal of winning the election and capturing the Jewish vote is probably a distinction without a difference, especially considering that, having now won two elections, Obama has never contradicted this message over the past seven years and in fact has repeated it. Though the speech is from 2008, Obama has repeatedly recycled the same themes since, in particular in his 2011 speech to the United Nations General Assembly and in his March 2012 speech before AIPAC, with almost word-for-word replication. Obama regurgitates a central concept embodied in the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948; for example — “exiled from the land of Israel the Jewish people remained faithful to it in all the countries of their dispersion, never ceasing to pray and hope for their return and the restoration of their national freedom. Impelled by this historic association, Jews strove throughout the centuries to go back to the land of their fathers and regain their statehood. In recent decades they returned in their masses.” This is sheer mythology, one of Ben-Gurion's many fabrications that he wrote into the Israeli Declaration of Independence. It has long been a part of the Zionist mythos, and has been swallowed uncritically by a wide range of people, including the American president. Though Jerusalem, or at least central Palestine, was the metropole of the development of monotheism and Judaism, the focus of biblical narrative, and the phrase “next year in Jerusalem,” made its way into one of the Jewish Seder prayers, apparently dating from the Middle Ages, in fact no practical effort was ever made by any of the world's Jews, up until the end of the nineteenth century, to settle in Palestine, and one searches in vain for any proposal for the creation of a Jewish state up to this period. Nor was a longing for Palestine or Jerusalem a widespread culturally induced icon within the Jewish community. The lack of any significant movement toward reclaiming the Holy Land, or migrations of Jews to the Holy Land, or even any significant amount of Jewish pilgrimages to the Holy Land, before about the 1880s by Jews attest to this. The concept of a Jewish migration from Europe and elsewhere to the Holy Land and the establishment of a Jewish state is a Christian, and not a Jewish, invention and was first embraced by the Jewish communities of the Russian Pale, and then only a small proportion of them, from about the 1880s onward owing to a wave of anti-Jewish violence in Russia. During this period about 1.5 million Jews from western Russia migrated to the United States and only a few thousand to Palestine. Overwhelmingly, the preference of Eastern European Jews during this period of emigration was the United States, not Palestine. It was Christianity, not Judaism, that introduced the idea of “wandering Jews” displaced from their original homeland and seeking to “return” to it. It was Christian Zionism that introduced the term “return” to describe a Jewish migration into Palestine, implying a continuity, if not an identification, between the ancient Judeans and modern Jews, and that Jews are the “lawful” owners of the land of Palestine. It is doubtful that anyone would invoke the term “return” to describe a contemporary conquest of Palestine by Egypt, or Persia or Macedonia for that matter, even though Egypt ruled Palestine a millennium before there was a Jewish city state in Jerusalem, the latter occurring at the end of the first millennium BCE. And likewise, both Persia and Macedonia, under Alexander the Great and his sons, ruled Palestine before Jewish rule, the latter not even encompassing all of Palestine and certainly not bearing a resemblance to a modern-day nation state. It is not exactly known when monotheism developed, but it was most probably in the middle of the first millennium BCE and concurrent with the writing of the Bible, which occurred most likely between the seventh and the fifth centuries of the first millennium BCE. According to historian Shlomo Sand in his recent book The Invention of the Land of Israel, “Jewish pilgrimages [to Jerusalem and the Holy Land] emerged as an afterthought to Christian pilgrimage. They never reached comparable dimensions and so perhaps cannot be considered an institutional practice. “Few Jewish pilgrims set out to the Holy land between the twelfth century and the end of the eighteenth century CE, by comparison to the tens of thousands of Christian pilgrims who made the trip during the same period … The degree to which the Land of Israel did not attract the ‘original children of Israel' is nonetheless astounding. “It is evident that journeying to the land of Israel was no more than a marginal practice in the life of the Jewish communities. All comparisons between the members of Christian and Jewish pilgrims reflect that Jewish trips to the Holy Land were a drop in the ocean. We know of approximately 30 texts that provide accounts of Jewish pilgrimages during the seventeen hundred years between 333 CE and 1878, and we have some 3,500 reports of Christian pilgrimages to the Holy Land.” It was English Christians, and not Eastern European Jews, who began the campaign to promote Jewish immigration to the Holy Land. The British Library in London contains the oldest document written in English on Christian Zionism, entitled Apocalypsis Apocalypseos (“A Revelation of the Revelation”), a 50-page monograph written in 1585 by the Anglican priest Thomas Brightman, often described as the “father of the restoration of the Jews.” In the document, Brightman argued that the “rebirth of a Christian Israelite nation” would become the “centre of the Christian world” and further that a “restoration” of the Jews to Palestine was necessary if England was to be blessed by God when history entered its last days and the prophesies of the Book of Daniel were fulfilled. However, the campaign only began in earnest with the ascendancy of the Puritans in England in the early seventeenth century, who engendered a refocus and a re-emphasis on the Old Testament and on the children of Israel with whom the Puritans identified. The historian Barbara Tuchman states that in “the period … up to 1600 let us say Palestine had been to the English a land of purely Christian association, though lost to the Christian world through the unfortunate intrusion of Islam. “Now it came to be remembered as the homeland of the Jews, the land carrying the scriptural promise of Israel's return. Interest now centred on fulfilling the scripture. Starting with the Puritans' ascendency, the movement among the English for the return of the Jews to Palestine began.” In the year 1649, the very peak and midpoint of Puritan rule in England, two English Puritans in Amsterdam, Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright, petitioned the government “that this nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Israel's sons and daughters in the ships to the land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance.” To understand their motives one must realise the transformation wrought by the Bible acting through the Puritan movement. It was as if every influence on thought exerted today by the press, radio, movies and magazines were equalled by one book speaking with the voice of God and reinforced by the temporal authority of the US Supreme Court. Particularly the Old Testament, with its narrative of a people convinced that they had been chosen by the Lord to do His work on earth, governed the Puritan mind. They applied its narrative to themselves. They were the self-chosen inheritors of Abraham's covenant with God, the re-embodied saints of Israel, the “battle-axe of the Lord,” in the words of the Prophet Jeremiah. Their guides were the prophets: their inspiration was owed not to the Heavenly father of Jesus, but to Jehovah, the Lord God of Hosts. Scripture, the word of God revealed to His chosen people, was their command, on the hearth as on the battlefield, in parliament as in church. Sand tells us that “woven through not only the Cartwrights' petition, but also the stance taken by the [UK] foreign secretary Lord Palmerston in the 1840s and Lord Balfour's well-known letter to Lord Rothschild in 1917, is a common thread or, to use another metaphor, a critical artery pulsating within the English (and subsequently British) body politic. Lacking this artery and the unique ideological elements it carried, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have ever been established.” Christian Zionists: Impelling the promotion of a Jewish migration into Palestine was a programme not essentially for the sake of Jews, but one that was read from the scriptures, or rather into the scriptures, that such an re-assemblage of Jews in the Land of the Children of Israel and then their conversion to Christianity was necessary for the return of Christ and a millennium of peace. Such ideas persist among Christian Zionists in our time. The Puritans believed this since their own doctrines were closer to Judaism, and the Jews, once in close contact with them, would find conversion to Christianity relatively smooth. The idea of a Jewish migration into and assemblage in Palestine was very much in the air by the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the Syrian campaign of Napoleon's expedition at the end of the eighteenth century, in which he had sought to defeat the Ottoman rulers, cut off Britain from its empire, and recreate the empire of Alexander from France to India, he became the first political leader to propose a sovereign Jewish State in Palestine. The French declaration of the time ran as follows: “Bonaparte, Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic in Africa and Asia, to the Rightful Heirs of Palestine. Israelites, unique nation, whom, in thousands of years, lust of conquest and tyranny were able to deprive of the ancestral lands only, but not of name and national existence … She [France] offers to your at this very time, and contrary to all expectations, Israel's patrimony … Rightful heirs of Palestine … hasten! “Now is the moment which may not return for thousands of years, to claim the restoration of your rights among the population of the universe which had shamefully withheld from you for thousands of years, your political existence as a nation among the nations, and the unlimited natural right to worship Yehovah in accordance with your faith, publicly and in likelihood forever.” It should be observed that Napoleon is here attempting to initiate a programme or a movement among Jews that, in his understanding, did not exist at that time. Napoleon is not trying to tap into a recognisable “2000-year-old yearning of Jews to return to Zion,” but is trying to create one from scratch. A similar conclusion can be reached from the following letter, written a half-century later in 1841, from Colonel Charles Henry Churchill, an ancestor of Winston Churchill, to Moses Montefiore. “I cannot conceal from you my anxious desire to see your countrymen endeavour once more to resume their existence as a people. I consider the object to be perfectly obtainable. But two things are indispensably necessary: firstly that the Jews themselves will take up the matter, universally and unanimously. Secondly, that the European powers will aid them in their views,” Churchill wrote. Lord Shaftesbury, a nobleman and philanthropist who had the ear of British prime ministers and others who held power in the mid-nineteenth century, and in particular that of Lord Palmerston, foreign secretary and prime minister from 1855 to 1865, was a deeply religious man who based his life on the Bible, “God's written word.” As he said, “I accept it, believe it, bless it, as announced in the Holy Writ.” He later became president of the Palestinian Exploration Fund, whose mission was to explore every inch of Palestine and to “prepare it for the return of its ancient possessors.” He also presided for 40 years over the London Society for the Promotion of Jewish Conversion to Christianity, whose signal achievement was the establishment by the Church of England of an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem with a converted Jew as its first bishop. Shaftesbury invented the phrase, “a country without a nation for a nation without a country,” which later transmogrified into the Zionist slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Tuchman writes that “on August 17, 1840, the Times published a letter on a plan to ‘plant the Jewish people in the land of their fathers' which it said was now under ‘serious consideration.' It commended the efforts of Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury), author of the plan, as ‘practical and statesmanlike' and quoted a canvass he was making of Jewish opinion designed to find out how they felt about a return to the Holy Land, how soon they would be ready to go back, and whether Jews ‘of station and property' would join in the return and invest their capital in the land if the Porte [the Ottoman Empire] could be induced to assure them law and justice and safety to person and estate and if their rights and privileges were ‘secure to them under the protection of a European power.'” By the late nineteenth century most of England was primed for the promotion of Jews to be assembled, “reassembled” as they put it, in Palestine. The literature of the period, from Milton to Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron to George Eliot and Benjamin Disraeli, the politician/novelist, promoted the assemblage of Jews in Palestine. The newspapers, the Manchester Guardian, in particular, and the political actors of the day with few dissenters were all aligned to the idea, driven by religious fervour combined with a vision of imperialism by proxy. Speaking on the floor of the House of Lords in 1922, five years after the Balfour Declaration, Balfour said “that he would be unfair to himself if he sat down without insisting ‘to the upmost of my ability' that there was a great deal involved in Britain's sponsorship of the Jews' return to their homeland. “This is the ideal which chiefly moves me … that Christendom is not oblivious to their faith, is not unmindful of the service they have rendered to the great religions of the world, and that we desire to the best of our ability to give them the opportunity of developing in peace and quietness under British rule those great gifts which hitherto they have been compelled to bring to fruition in countries which know not their language and belong not to their race. “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in the age-long tradition in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land,” Balfour said. The idea of planting a European minority of outsiders upon an indigenous majority population, without consulting it, was not calculated to horrify men who had worked with Cecil Rhodes or promoted European settlement in Kenya. Of what was Balfour speaking? Was he talking about Jewish history, or was he talking about five centuries of English philosemitism, from the 50-page Christian Zionist monograph of Thomas Brightman to the declaration that bears Balfour's name? That is, was he speaking of Jewish history, or was he speaking of the English interpretation of that history and the contribution of the British conceptualisation of that history, however Balfour may have understood his own words? Was he not referring, not to Jewish endeavours, but to the long and deep tradition within British society and culture of Christian Zionism? Ben-Gurion's insertion into the Israeli Declaration of Independence of the claim of 2000 years of Jewish yearning and struggle to return to Palestine is a fraud and an effort to claim provenance for the creation of Zionism which was, in fact, a product of Christians, or of Christian society. It was Christian culture that developed and nurtured the concept of the return of the Jews and the continuity of the ancient Judeans with modern Jews, overlooking the possibility that modern Jews might well not be the descendants of the ancient Judeans, as it ever more looks like they are not. This created trait of continuity, and identification, of ancient Judeans with modern Jews has today allowed Netanyahu and the Revisionist/Lukud strain of Zionism to claim a right of proprietorship over Palestine, which in his view and theirs overrides the constraints of international law, in particular, international law's injunction against ethnic cleansing. However much Netanyahu and his Lukud Party, and most Israelis for that matter, would be displeased to hear it, Jewish Zionism is an outgrowth of a Christian Zionism that developed, incubated and nurtured it, and it is not an autogenetic, self-contained or autochthonous product of Jewish energy. Obama's modest background: Obama's pre-presidential background in foreign policy was modest, consisting of his having taken some classes on foreign policy at Columbia University as an undergraduate and serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when he was a member of the United States Senate. Notwithstanding his tenure on the committee, and maybe with the exception of his vote against authorisation for the Iraq invasion, he seems never to have attempted to influence American foreign policy in any significant way. According to commentator Fawaz Gerges in his book Obama and the Middle East, Obama had read a few popular books on foreign affairs — Fareed Zakaria's Post-American World and Thomas Freedman's The World is Flat among them, as well as Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell, a history of genocides. He certainly lacked the foreign policy experience of some whom he appointed to cabinet, or deputy cabinet, including John Kerry, Richard Holbrook and others. One searches in vain for any detailed and highly competent writings or speeches on foreign policy given by Obama that go beyond idealistic platitudes, however soaring the rhetoric might be. Looking to the beginning of his presidency, his only foreign policy projections were to correct the overextended foreign policy and adventurism of his predecessor and affect a retraction of foreign involvement by ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and retrenching American energy toward a domestic agenda. Obama's orientation is towards domestic policy, as an academic programme of constitutional law would suppose. Between Columbia and Harvard Law School, Obama worked not in any capacity having to do with foreign policy but as a community organiser in Chicago's south side. The contrast with Carter is instructive. On coming into office, Carter clearly identified several areas of foreign policy in which he was determined to act. These were to establish a working relation with the then-Soviet government on the issue of nuclear arms reductions; to complete the diplomacy initiated by his predecessor Richard Nixon and establish full diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China; to resolve the growing potential conflict with Panama over the Panama Canal and to complete a treaty that previous presidents had left dangling; to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; to reduce America's dependence on the importation of foreign oil and to end the possibility of a disruption of oil supplies as, for instance, had been caused by the Arab oil embargo of 1973; and to move South Africa toward constructive change and away from apartheid. Carter was largely successful in carrying out these initiatives. By contrast, there were no positive foreign policy initiatives envisioned by Obama other than the intention of ending US involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. The so-called “pivot toward Asia,” which was also a pivot away from involvement in the Middle East, only reflects the reaction against Bush policies and was an effort at correction. It was a reaction rather than a genuinely positive refocus. If one ignores the idealistic words and speeches, however, a fairly consistent foreign policy strategy, consistent with Obama's disposition toward limited foreign involvement, is discernable. In the historical tension between idealism and realpolitik, Obama comes down on the side of realpolitik. Thus, foreign involvement is only justified if America's vital interests are threatened. Thought of in this way, the Palestinians are as peripheral to core American interests as the Bahrain protestors in Pearl Square during the Arab Spring. Though Obama exhibited sympathies toward the peaceful protests of the latter when they began in Syria, and when the rebel fighters resisted the crush of the Syrian army, Obama rejected former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's proposals to arm the Syrian rebels, and even now American aid to the moderate Syrian rebels is quite modest. What is not modest, however, is the effort to defeat the Islamic State (IS) group while the regime led by Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in Damascus is largely ignored. Overthrowing or destabilising the Al-Assad regime would not make any more sense to Obama than the invasion of Iraq under Bush. In terms of realpolitik, there is little contribution that the Palestinians or their liberation can make to US strategic interests, whereas there is considerable cooperation between the US and Israel on security matters. One might argue, as many have, that the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with Israel's continued occupation and land confiscation, is harmful to America's image in the Arab world and is possibly behind much of the unrest and overall hostility harboured by some towards the US. But this involves long-term interests and, further, a clear straight line cannot be drawn between a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem and a diminution of tensions and conflicts in the Middle East. The combined efforts of the US and Israel to develop the Stuxnet virus, or malware, which did considerable damage to the Iranian centrifuges at the Natanz nuclear facility in Iran, and the recently revealed combined US-Mossad intelligence cooperation which resulted in the assassination of Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah's international operations chief, along with the combined British, Israeli and US espionage on Iranian government leaders recently revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, indicate the close security cooperation between the US and Israel on matters of security and the fight against terrorists threats. They also reflect a shared interest in matters of security, an interest not shared between the US and the Palestinians. Despite Obama's pledge in 2009 in Cairo to do everything in his power to achieve a Palestinian state living peacefully beside a secure Israel, he is not going to discard or risk the loss of the potential intelligence asset of Israel's technical capability and experience in the Middle East in order to achieve freedom for the Palestinian people. Nor has he shown the slightest interest in risking political capital in a public fight with Israel over basic issues. At the time this article is written, there is a test of wills between the White House and the Israeli government, led by Netanyahu's implacable hostility to any compromise in negotiations on the Iranian nuclear programme. This is a battle Obama did not choose. Rather, it represents a challenge by the Israeli government to Obama's determination to avoid further military involvement in the Middle East and, in particular, a war with Iran, which Netanyahu has been trying to promote, and to avoid the US being drawn into a war with Iran initiated by Israel. Obama's concentration on the implementation of a policy based on realpolitik allows him to avoid acquiring a detailed knowledge of the history of Israel or of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or, for that matter, of any other area of foreign policy. The paragraphs quoted at the beginning of this article reveal that, at best, Obama has a superficial knowledge of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and its history. They also reveal his embrace of 60-year-old Israeli propaganda that has been largely discredited by the writing of historians, mostly Israelis, in the 1990s, among them Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim. Obama could do no better at the beginning of last summer's Israeli war against Gaza than repeat the Bush mantra we have heard so often: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” As in the case of his predecessor, there was no consideration of the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves. Nor was there any consideration of who was being defended against whom. This often repeated platitude reflects considerable shallowness and is an indication that Obama has given very little thought to the actual nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is difficult to imagine Obama replicating Carter's 13-day Camp David Summit, which consisted of virtually non-stop debates between Carter and the then-Israeli prime minister, Menachem Begin, with Netanyahu now replacing Begin. Obama lacks the interest, the passion and the necessary knowledge or historical grasp to conduct such a session. But Obama would hardly undertake such a summit in the first place. Israel can offer the US cooperation at the security level with Israeli intelligence. The Palestinians have little to offer Obama. Do not expect any significant progress from the Obama administration for the rest of the president's term. If there is to be any change in the configuration between the Palestinians and the Israelis, it will come from the International Court of Justice. The writer is an expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Middle East.
