Unless Obama can change the US's Middle East policy, which means confronting Israel's new right-wing leadership, his entire programme for change will collapse, writes Hassan Nafaa The Arabs habitually look forward to every new incumbent in the White House. They hope he will give higher priority than his predecessors to Middle Eastern concerns, and they pray that he will be fairer in handling the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet they invariably find that the new president is not in a hurry to deal with their thorny problems, and then, when he does, they discover that he is even more pro-Israel than presidents past. Available documents testify that no sooner does a new president step foot into the Oval Office than his aides caution him against getting involved too soon in the Arab-Israeli conflict, so as not to jeopardise his chances for re-election. They then advise him to put it off to his second term. But by the time he gets around to dealing with that conflict in his second term, the next presidential elections loom and he is urged not to take any action or stand that might spoil the chances of his party's nominee. So ultimately he finds himself obliged to prove to the powerful Zionist lobby that he is the most faithful president to Israel in the history of the United States. This cycle, which has subjected US-Israeli relations to an endless spiral of stauncher and stauncher pro-Israel posturing, and has encouraged Israel to ever-greater heights of intransigence and extremism. It seems, however, that the cycle is about to break. I have two reasons to believe this. The first has to do with the nature of the new US leadership. Obama is not a conventional president; he is an anomaly brought to power by the extraordinary circumstances that led the US imperialist drive to a dead end. The circumstances were such that any administration to assume leadership at this juncture must immediately set into motion a process of radical change, and the American electorate believed that Obama was the most qualified candidate for this purpose. US foreign policy and its policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict, in particular, must be part of this process of change. The second reason is Israeli folly and its unintended results. The Israeli government took a decision to wage a full-scale war on Gaza that aimed, among other things, to uproot Hamas and place before the incoming Obama administration a new de facto reality that would enable Tel Aviv to control the agenda of the drive to produce a political settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel failed to accomplish these objectives. Hamas is still firmly in place in Gaza and Obama was handed an opportunity to reorder his priorities. One of Obama's first actions upon coming to power was to appoint a special envoy to the Middle East and dispatch him to the region immediately. This is certainly not what Israel had planned on, especially given that the new envoy is George Mitchell, who had once officially told Israel to halt settlement construction. Before Israel committed its massacre in Gaza the common impression had been that the Arab-Israeli conflict would not feature very soon on the agenda of the incoming administration that would be preoccupied with the financial crisis that rocked the US economy and ricocheted throughout the global economy in 2008. However, several months ago I had already begun to sense that US-Israeli relations were headed towards a crossroads, especially if Obama were to become president in the US and Netanyahu won in the Israeli elections. Indeed, beneath the title "Differing directions" in Al-Ahram Weekly of 6 November 2008, I wrote: "No political analyst can predict with absolute confidence the results of an election in any country, especially in Israel or the US. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the public moods in Israel and the US are totally different. In Israel, the liberal and left- wing forces no longer have the ability to lead the Zionist project in its current stage of development and, therefore, are unable to offer an alternative that would steer Israel out of its current predicament. Since the primary contest in Israel today is between the ultra right and the even more extreme right, it appears that the Likud Party will gain enough parliamentary seats to enable its leader, Netanyahu, to form a government. "In the US, the political climate appears to have swung in the opposite direction. When an African American can defeat the wife of a former US president in the political party primaries and become the Democratic Party's presidential candidate this can only mean that a critical mass is building up in favour of radical -- as opposed to merely superficial or cosmetic -- change in the US's foreign and domestic policies. However, since the true left has no history of note in the US, the pendulum has shifted from the ultra right to the most moderate right. Therefore, I have little doubt that, unless something extraordinary occurs, Obama will win, especially in light of the repercussions of the recent fiscal crisis. This, in turn, will soon bring to the fore the nature and substance of US-Israeli relations in the Obama/Netanyahu period." I then added: "I know that many will hasten to remind me of how strong US-Israeli relations have always been, that some two-thirds of American Jews generally vote Democrat, and that an even greater number will vote for Obama in this election for reasons too numerous to go into here. Yet, as much as I know that Obama will do his utmost to help Israel and will try to refrain from placing any strains on US-Israeli relations, he will still be faced with the inevitable question as to the type of change he is seeking and how he can bring it about. I am convinced that it will be impossible to introduce any essential change into US domestic and foreign policies unless the vision for change includes the reformulation of the substance of US-Israeli relations. "Obama is aware how much the world has changed. He knows that the US's weight in the global order has dwindled considerably, that the exhilaration that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union has entirely faded, and that the neoconservatives have behaved with extreme blindness and folly. He knows, in other words, that he will not be able to shape the world wearing American blinkers, that he will have to coordinate with the EU and Japan on questions related to the laying of the foundations of a new global fiscal and, perhaps, economic order; that he will have to consult with Russia, China and maybe India on matters related to nuclear proliferation; and that he will probably have to enter into serious talks with Iran and, perhaps, Syria and Turkey on the question of an ordered withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. Since Netanyahu, if he wins the next Israeli elections, would fight most of these approaches every inch of the way, it is difficult to envision smooth sailing for an Obama/Netanyahu phase of US-Israeli relations. The Obama phenomenon is not a bubble that Netanyahu can blow at or make go away." Today, after having seen what the intervening months have brought, I cannot say that I am at all surprised by the victory of the ultra right in Israel in the Knesset elections (65 out of 120 seats). True, Tzipi Livni's Kadima Party came out ahead of Netanyahu's Likud by a single seat, but the latter's chances of forming a government are stronger. In all events, whatever government emerges it is certain to be more extreme than the current one, which will place the Obama administration before a difficult test. I do not believe it will be long before Obama discovers that the forthcoming Israeli government will throw its whole weight behind sabotaging his programme for change. It will certainly do its best to undermine any serious US rapprochement with Iran and Syria and it will obstruct any ideas for a peace settlement along the lines of those advocated by former US President Jimmy Carter. In his latest book, We Can Have Peace In The Holy Land: A Plan That Will Work, Carter accuses the Bush administration of encouraging Israeli intransigence and exercising pressures on the Palestinian Authority and other Arab parties in order to forestall the creation of a Palestinian national unity government led by Hamas. The policy, he said, obstructed any progress towards the two-state solution. More importantly, here, Carter held that there is still hope for the two-state solution if the new US administration does what it should and throws its full weight behind it. Carter further advised the incoming administration to talk with Iran and Syria, to cooperate with Hamas and to promote a settlement on the Syrian and Lebanese tracks. In short, Carter proposes a framework for a comprehensive settlement similar to the Arab peace initiative adopted at the Beirut summit in 2002, and the fact that his book appeared on the day Obama was inaugurated suggests that Carter, at least, believes that there is a chance that Obama might adopt his plan and that, if he did, he could make it succeed. However, as we all know, a two-state solution along these lines is not at all acceptable to the Israeli right, which now controls a majority in the Knesset. Therefore, regardless of whether Netanhayu or Livni head the next government, I am convinced that US-Israeli relations are headed towards an inevitable collision course. Will Obama hold his ground if put to the test early? It is difficult to predict the answer to this question. The one thing we can foresee for certain is that his entire programme for change will collapse if he fails. A final point remains regarding the Arab world. It is not clear whether the Arab world is even aware that the international order has changed and that this crucial juncture offers them a window of opportunity to exert pressure on the US and Israel. When they do realise this, then we can hope they also realise that it will be in their interests to take advantage of the popularity of the resistance, rather than clashing with it. This article expresses the ideas of the author in a personal capacity and not as secretary-general of the Arab Thought Forum.
