By Jonathan Freedland (THE GUARDIAN, 23/07/08):
It’s lucky Barack Obama has people to carry his bags these days, because when he arrived in Israel last night he brought with him a whole lot of baggage. Most of it was packed with negative associations that owe more to urban myth than reality, but that combined to make the Democratic candidate an object of suspicion from the earliest days of his campaign, first among American Jews and then in Israel. The mix of facts, lies and hybrids of the two is now wearily familiar: Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim; he was educated in a madrasa; he has terrorist friends; his former pastor is an Israel-hater and admirer of the anti-Jewish Louis Farrakhan; he was against the war on Iraq, wants to talk to Iran - and will therefore fall to his knees to appease Israel’s enemies.
The Obama camp has worked hard to dump all this cargo, but it has been stubborn to shift. Opinion polls show that US Jewry’s traditional three-to-one backing for the Democrats remains intact, with most supporting Obama. But while the Illinois senator can look forward to a euphoric response in Berlin tomorrow night, and in London and Paris thereafter, Israel is one of the few places where he faces a hostile, or at least uncertain, public. Recent polls have Israelis backing John McCain over Obama, just as they preferred Hillary Clinton a few months back.
The people answering those surveys may well have made up their minds some 18 months ago, when the novice senator told a handful of Iowa voters that “No one is suffering more than the Palestinians”. That single line crystallised the view that Obama, who had once dined with the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, would be chilly to Israel were he ever to reach the White House.
The result is that the Israel-Palestine leg of Obama’s current world tour will be the trickiest, placing him under the closest scrutiny. He will be watched not only by Israelis and Arabs in the region, but by their cheerleaders back home in the US, looking for any misstep, any sign of a new tilt towards one side or the other.
Not that friends of the Palestinians have high hopes for true evenhandedness. They have seen the way Obama has sought to dismantle that earlier image of himself by swearing his granite support for Israel. With some ingenuity, he even recast the soundbite that had got him in such trouble, declaring: “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel.”
So a second position has arisen, which holds that, far from ushering in a new approach - one that would see Washington willing to lean on Israel - a President Obama would bend over backwards to prove his pro-Israel credentials. There was no clearer illustration than the speech he gave to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last month, the morning after he had bagged the Democratic nomination. He hymned his admiration for and belief in the Jewish state. He declared: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel.” And then, though his audience was already on its feet applauding, fully satisfied, he added: “And it must remain undivided.”
With those extra five words, Obama - buddy of Edward Said and bearer of an Arabic middle name - had put himself to the right of the Israeli government. Ever since the failed Camp David talks of 2000, it has been mainstream Israeli thinking that Jerusalem would have to serve as the capital of both Israel and an eventual Palestinian state. Negotiations currently under way between the two sides doubtless take that as read. Yet here was a candidate for president forbidding any such compromise.
Predictably, and in the face of Palestinian outrage, Obama had to row back from the remark, thereby irritating the very pro-Israel forces he had been so eager to please. The end result was to delight the McCain team - who insisted again yesterday that Obama is “frighteningly inexperienced” and woefully naive - but also to confirm the worst fears of the most extreme elements in both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine camps. It was the Israel-pandering hawk who made the Jerusalem promise - and the Arab-loving appeaser who withdrew it.
Which one of these men is the real Barack Obama? The answer is neither. For one thing, both figures were always holograms, projections from fevered, partisan imaginations. Sure, Obama had expressed sympathy for the Palestinians - but so, if not often, has George W Bush. It didn’t, and doesn’t, make the senator a card-carrying member of Hamas.
Nor do his recent efforts to assure Israel of his support, which will doubtless grow yet more poetic and effusive today, make Obama the soul brother of Binyamin Netanyahu. They are, let’s be clear, part of a broader effort by Obama to tack to the centre, in the time-honoured fashion of all nominees emerging from the internal battle of party primaries. If he has a more centrist position on the Middle East, that’s only because he also has a more centrist position on gun control and corporate taxation.
The less lurid reality is that Obama is a down-the-line US Democrat - and firm support for Israel comes with that territory. On that simple metric, there will be no change. But that does not leave him indistinguishable from McCain. On the contrary, clear differences are there (chiefly on talking to Iran) - and most point in a direction that should be welcomed by those who yearn for Middle East peace.
First, Obama will today show a basic respect for the Palestinians that somehow eluded his Republican opponent: the Democrat will visit Ramallah, which McCain skipped when he came to the region in March. Second, Obama is honest enough to admit that the Israel-Palestine conflict does at least contribute to instability in the region, while McCain sees no source of trouble except “radical Islamic terrorism”.
Above all, Obama promises to do, once more, the work that a US administration alone can do - engaging hands-on, directly and every day, in shepherding the two sides through negotiations and towards peace. Bill Clinton toiled in this way until his last hours in office; Bush, by contrast, steered well clear of the whole messy business until last autumn, when he panicked that he might have no other legacy to point to. Obama has faulted both Clinton and Bush for getting stuck in too late. Yesterday, in Amman, he vowed to roll up his sleeves, “from the minute I’m sworn into office”.
But Obama is sending a signal more powerful than mere words. Accompanying him on this trip is Dennis Ross, the veteran mediator who served both Clinton and Bush’s father. Ross has his critics, but no one doubts his knowledge or experience. “I see him as the diplomatic equivalent of Michael Jordan working the Middle East,” says David Makovsky, a colleague of Ross’s at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is neutral in all elections. “He has the skill and the finesse.”
With Ross at his side, Obama is signalling that we should forget the myth-making: an Obama presidency will be about active, engaged diplomacy, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israel and Syria, and beyond. And if anyone doubts that this is what the world desperately needs after the past seven and a half years, then they haven’t been paying attention.
It’s lucky Barack Obama has people to carry his bags these days, because when he arrived in Israel last night he brought with him a whole lot of baggage. Most of it was packed with negative associations that owe more to urban myth than reality, but that combined to make the Democratic candidate an object of suspicion from the earliest days of his campaign, first among American Jews and then in Israel. The mix of facts, lies and hybrids of the two is now wearily familiar: Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim; he was educated in a madrasa; he has terrorist friends; his former pastor is an Israel-hater and admirer of the anti-Jewish Louis Farrakhan; he was against the war on Iraq, wants to talk to Iran - and will therefore fall to his knees to appease Israel’s enemies.
The Obama camp has worked hard to dump all this cargo, but it has been stubborn to shift. Opinion polls show that US Jewry’s traditional three-to-one backing for the Democrats remains intact, with most supporting Obama. But while the Illinois senator can look forward to a euphoric response in Berlin tomorrow night, and in London and Paris thereafter, Israel is one of the few places where he faces a hostile, or at least uncertain, public. Recent polls have Israelis backing John McCain over Obama, just as they preferred Hillary Clinton a few months back.
The people answering those surveys may well have made up their minds some 18 months ago, when the novice senator told a handful of Iowa voters that “No one is suffering more than the Palestinians”. That single line crystallised the view that Obama, who had once dined with the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, would be chilly to Israel were he ever to reach the White House.
The result is that the Israel-Palestine leg of Obama’s current world tour will be the trickiest, placing him under the closest scrutiny. He will be watched not only by Israelis and Arabs in the region, but by their cheerleaders back home in the US, looking for any misstep, any sign of a new tilt towards one side or the other.
Not that friends of the Palestinians have high hopes for true evenhandedness. They have seen the way Obama has sought to dismantle that earlier image of himself by swearing his granite support for Israel. With some ingenuity, he even recast the soundbite that had got him in such trouble, declaring: “Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel.”
So a second position has arisen, which holds that, far from ushering in a new approach - one that would see Washington willing to lean on Israel - a President Obama would bend over backwards to prove his pro-Israel credentials. There was no clearer illustration than the speech he gave to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last month, the morning after he had bagged the Democratic nomination. He hymned his admiration for and belief in the Jewish state. He declared: “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel.” And then, though his audience was already on its feet applauding, fully satisfied, he added: “And it must remain undivided.”
With those extra five words, Obama - buddy of Edward Said and bearer of an Arabic middle name - had put himself to the right of the Israeli government. Ever since the failed Camp David talks of 2000, it has been mainstream Israeli thinking that Jerusalem would have to serve as the capital of both Israel and an eventual Palestinian state. Negotiations currently under way between the two sides doubtless take that as read. Yet here was a candidate for president forbidding any such compromise.
Predictably, and in the face of Palestinian outrage, Obama had to row back from the remark, thereby irritating the very pro-Israel forces he had been so eager to please. The end result was to delight the McCain team - who insisted again yesterday that Obama is “frighteningly inexperienced” and woefully naive - but also to confirm the worst fears of the most extreme elements in both the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine camps. It was the Israel-pandering hawk who made the Jerusalem promise - and the Arab-loving appeaser who withdrew it.
Which one of these men is the real Barack Obama? The answer is neither. For one thing, both figures were always holograms, projections from fevered, partisan imaginations. Sure, Obama had expressed sympathy for the Palestinians - but so, if not often, has George W Bush. It didn’t, and doesn’t, make the senator a card-carrying member of Hamas.
Nor do his recent efforts to assure Israel of his support, which will doubtless grow yet more poetic and effusive today, make Obama the soul brother of Binyamin Netanyahu. They are, let’s be clear, part of a broader effort by Obama to tack to the centre, in the time-honoured fashion of all nominees emerging from the internal battle of party primaries. If he has a more centrist position on the Middle East, that’s only because he also has a more centrist position on gun control and corporate taxation.
The less lurid reality is that Obama is a down-the-line US Democrat - and firm support for Israel comes with that territory. On that simple metric, there will be no change. But that does not leave him indistinguishable from McCain. On the contrary, clear differences are there (chiefly on talking to Iran) - and most point in a direction that should be welcomed by those who yearn for Middle East peace.
First, Obama will today show a basic respect for the Palestinians that somehow eluded his Republican opponent: the Democrat will visit Ramallah, which McCain skipped when he came to the region in March. Second, Obama is honest enough to admit that the Israel-Palestine conflict does at least contribute to instability in the region, while McCain sees no source of trouble except “radical Islamic terrorism”.
Above all, Obama promises to do, once more, the work that a US administration alone can do - engaging hands-on, directly and every day, in shepherding the two sides through negotiations and towards peace. Bill Clinton toiled in this way until his last hours in office; Bush, by contrast, steered well clear of the whole messy business until last autumn, when he panicked that he might have no other legacy to point to. Obama has faulted both Clinton and Bush for getting stuck in too late. Yesterday, in Amman, he vowed to roll up his sleeves, “from the minute I’m sworn into office”.
But Obama is sending a signal more powerful than mere words. Accompanying him on this trip is Dennis Ross, the veteran mediator who served both Clinton and Bush’s father. Ross has his critics, but no one doubts his knowledge or experience. “I see him as the diplomatic equivalent of Michael Jordan working the Middle East,” says David Makovsky, a colleague of Ross’s at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is neutral in all elections. “He has the skill and the finesse.”
With Ross at his side, Obama is signalling that we should forget the myth-making: an Obama presidency will be about active, engaged diplomacy, between Israelis and Palestinians, between Israel and Syria, and beyond. And if anyone doubts that this is what the world desperately needs after the past seven and a half years, then they haven’t been paying attention.
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