Saturday, May 28, 2011

How Obama enables Israel’s worst impulses

Rashid Khalidi explains how President Obama is reinforcing every roadblock to peace Israel has created

By Rashid Khalidi, Salon, May 27, 2011
 
How Obama enables Isrel's worst impulses
Reuters/Jim Young
U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, May 20, 2011.
 
The old Arabic proverb has it that the dogs bark but the caravan goes on. President Obama’s comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speeches last week at the State Department and then at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) produced a great deal of sound and fury in Washington. However, the sense I had being in Beirut and the Gulf when they were delivered was that they meant much less to Arabs than they did in Washington or in Israel. There is little sense in the Arab world or among Palestinians that the United States has a constructive role to play in resolving this conflict. Indeed, if anything, it has only succeeded in making itself even more of a roadblock to progress than it was before.

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