Obama’s latest surrender to Israel - Gordon Campbell on Scoop Independent News

[althecat]

Obama’s latest surrender to Israel

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL200911/S00129.htm

President Barack Obama’s single most important foreign policy decision during 2009 has been his recent backdown over requiring Israel to abandon the building of settlements in the occupied territories. Beforehand, this was to be a precondition for peace talks. This capitulation to the Israelis has blown the credibility that Obama had built up so carefully in the Arab world, torpedoed the Fatah wing of the Palestinian leadership that the US has been supporting, and made it virtually impossible for the Iranians to accept the deal being brokered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over their nuclear programme. Such failure will in turn, embolden the Israelis to take military action against Iran.

In next month’s New York Review of Books, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley summarise the current mess in this fashion:

……Obama is only the latest in a string of American presidents who have shown few limits to the harm they can inflict on those Palestinians they purport to strengthen. By twice twisting Abbas’s arm, first to attend a meeting with Netanyahu and then to withdraw the Goldstone report < on human rights abuses during the recent Israel offensive in Gaza> the administration unwittingly hurt him more in the space of two weeks than its predecessor had done in as many terms. The US hope was to tame Netanyahu, empower Abbas, motivate peace advocates, curtail extremists, and energize negotiations. So far, it has accomplished the precise opposite.

In the short term, this unraveling has now placed a large question mark over the elections in Palestine, due in January. At best, these will only be possible in the West Bank, and – given the damage Obama has done to Abbas – perhaps not even there. Yet of all the consequences, the worst is likely to prove to have been the impact on the Iran deal. What the IAEA was proposing was that Iran should agree to have the processing of the nuclear material ( for its valid nuclear energy needs) carried out in other countries.

Iran has always resented the double standard involved: that Israel can develop nuclear weapons and flout the world’s anti-proliferation measures with impunity, while Iran is being threatened with war if it goes down the same path. To have Obama now publicly abandon any pressure on Israel to deal in good faith with the Palestinians would have made the hardliners in Teheran more likely to baulk at allowing their sovereignty to be abridged in the fashion proposed. Especially now the IAEA has investigated the ‘secret site’ at Qom – touted by Obama and Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Milliband a few months ago as a grave cause of concern – and found it to pose no danger whatsoever.

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL200911/S00129.htm