If we want people to support the Arab position then we had better offer them a coherent position to support, argues Galal Nassar Most of the commentaries and analyses in the Arab media marking the end of US President Barack Obama's first 100 days in office have been pessimistic about his ability to substantially change US foreign policy towards the Middle East in general, and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular. Some commentators remain suspicious of his intentions, arguing that he will be no different -- as pro-Israeli and as anti-Arab -- as his predecessors. This is an immutable constant in US policy, they argue, and on this point there is no difference between Obama and McCain or between Democrats and Republicans. Historically the Democrats have given more to Israel than the Republicans. But as long as there was a possibility that Obama's courting of the Jewish lobby was for show the staunchest Zionists voted for McCain and the promise of a continuation of Bush's policy. Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, is Jewish, though that may mean little in practice. And while Obama pledged to remain committed to Israeli security without adding a similar comment with regard to Palestine, it was hardly to be expected that he would issue a statement saying the reverse. A good part of the problem is to be found with the Arabs. We always expect far too much from others, upon whom we throw our troubles rather than take matters in our own hands. We grumble and groan when others fail to meet our expectations and we do not get what we had hoped for. Instead of doing what needs to be done we tell ourselves that it is too soon, that Obama needs time, the new president is still getting the feel of things. The weaker we feel the more we cling to the hope that others will act in our stead. Then when their actions go contrary to our hopes we swing from total optimism to total pessimism, from joy to depression. We think in absolutes. We have trapped ourselves in antitheses, whereas reality is a range of subtle gradations. We condemn extremism but are given to extremes. After realising the "pledge" for its establishment in 1948, Israel occupied the rest of Palestine in 1967 and today, as Iraq and Sudan are disintegrating, Zionists still harbour the dream of a Greater Israel stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates. This expanding state has received the unequivocal support of all US presidents, Republican and Democrat, extremist and moderate. By the time the Arabs realised we had to accept Palestine cut down to the 1948 borders it was too late. Settlers in the occupied Palestinian territories soared from 5,000 to 750,000. Then we turned to the gradual approach: take what we can get now and ask for the rest later. What we got was a Palestinian Authority which split between Hamas and Fatah, occupation forces in the West Bank and a blockaded and beleaguered Gaza. And still we refused to learn. If we remain prey to this all-or-nothing mentality -- either Fatah or Hamas and either Palestine from Jordan to the Mediterranean or nothing -- we may soon wake up to find that the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders is not an option, Israeli settlements having long since put paid to those borders. Why can't we encourage our friends instead of frustrating them? In one of the Sacred Sayings of the Prophet, God said, "If he draws near me by an arm's length, I shall draw near to him by a fathom's length. And if he comes to me walking, I shall hasten to him with speed." You cannot expect from others more than others think you are worth. No established religious culture maintains that the frail are doomed and the strong fated to be saved. We have the power to change. The ball is in our court. We hold the reins. If the Arabs are to hone their potential effectively and up their esteem in others' eyes they must first settle their internal differences, starting with reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. How can we possibly enter into a dialogue with our enemies when we cannot even speak with each other? How can we effectively negotiate with strangers when we are unable to reach agreement within our own ranks, leaving the field wide open for the enemy to play one of our factions off against the other? Who are those who might ally themselves with "our" cause supposed to aid and support? The advocates of peace talks or the advocates of resistance? The "moderates" or the "extremists?" To make matters worse, the Palestinian-Palestinian rift is spreading. Instead of a synthesis in Palestine, we have deepening contradictions in the rest of the Arab world, to the extent that they threaten to solidify into unbridgeable divides. Rather than blaming the US and falling back on the easy formula that there is no difference between one administration and the next we could re-examine the leverage we might assert in Washington and re-engage in the political game, coolly and sensibly, without hurling blanket condemnations and accusations. After all, US interests in this region are enormous: oil and petroleum revenues, investments, markets and a strategic alliance between the US and the Arab political order are of inestimable value. Nothing is handed to you on a plate. Everything has to be painstakingly built up, which requires patience and persistence, assiduous planning and lots of hard work. The sea is but an accumulation of drops, as the poet Mohamed Iqbal put it. It took planning and persistence for Israel to secure such staunch and unwavering support from Washington, while the Arabs sat back on their heels, pulling their hair and bewailing the cruelties of fate. Everything is in motion; nothing remains the same -- apart, it would seem, from the Arabs, who persist in regarding the US as having all the choices and themselves as perpetually weak. In so doing, they have given the West an invaluable psychological advantage. Whereas their modernism has enabled them to move from the stationary to the dynamic, the Arabs have chosen to remain a predictable constant, as though determined to condemn the "variable" as heresy. The Arabs must learn a more subtle, discriminating history. There are shades of difference that escape the untrained eye. The good and morally conscientious Carter was not the same as the Hollywood cowboy Reagan. The music and fun-loving Clinton is a far stretch from the staunchly neoconservative war hawk Bush. And Obama, who has pledged to bring the US back to what he regards as its true spirit, to give right priority over might, is a long shot from McCain who promised a perpetuation of Bush's black and white, trigger-happy approach to the world. Practical intelligence and political acumen involve working your way through such qualitative differences, like water cleaving through cracks in the ground or snakes slithering through gaps between the rocks. Why should we make bugbears out of the components of the opposing side: the pro-Israel lobbies such as AIPEC, the Pentagon and the military- industrial establishment, the anti-Arab hate groups? All these are countered by other groups: peace activists, human rights organisations and minority defence groups, the old, new and liberal left, the defenders of the Third World. Moreover, the US has sometimes acted contrary to "type". It stood against France, Britain and Israel over the tripartite invasion of Egypt following the nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956. It stood against the Serbian invasion of Bosnia and halted the massacres of Bosnian Muslims. While these may be exceptions they suggest that the US is not always wrong. And in politics there are no absolutes; nothing is absolutely right or wrong, good or evil. Once the Arabs begin to appreciate subtler shades of politics they can begin to actively address the different layers of political awareness in American society. It is a complex and composite consciousness, ranging from the superficial to the profound, and consisting of the mindset of interests and the mindset of values, the colonialist present and the liberationist past, a history of wars of aggression and a symbol of liberty and self-determination, UN resolutions rammed through by threat and coercion and a constitution forged through consensus. The American political consciousness also fluctuates between blatant cynicism and committed idealism. Whereas Johnson, Reagan and George W Bush tended towards the former, Carter, Ford and Clinton tended towards the latter, as does Obama. The deeper moral level of America's political consciousness, as embodied by its founders, remains alive today. It has run an indelible course through such figures as Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King, whose dream has been realised with the election of the first African-American president. Surely the Arabs should not remain blind to this in any vigilant quest for their rights.
