Wallwritings

by James M. Wall

New York Times columnist Roger Cohen was one of many media liberals who was surprised to find himself supporting the President’s decision to intervene in Libya.  He had not expected Obama to embrace American exceptionalism with such enthusiasm.

Cohen is not speaking of the neo-conservative self-righteous, superior exceptionalism, but of an American exceptionalism “as a transformative moral beacon to the world.” Cohen figured the term itself made the president “uneasy”. He explains:

And yet, and yet, this cautious president, who has been subtly talking down American power — with reason — has involved the nation in a new conflict in Libya, one in which his own defense secretary holds that the United States has no “vital interest.” He has joined a long line of U.S. leaders in discovering the moral imperative indivisible from the American idea.

Michigan professor Juan Cole, another liberal who supported President Obama’s air war intervention over Libya, is now equally enthusiastic over his decision to pull back in favor of NATO.

Cole’s Informed Comment column on Friday points to two significant developments which suggests a political solution could be imminent in Libya: The US withdrawal from active military participation and the growing number of inner-circle defections away from Muammar Quaddafi.

The situation remains fluid, so this optimism could disappear overnight. There also remains the presence of American CIA operatives on the ground in Libya, assisting the rebel forces and helping to identify targets for the allied bombing runs. Technically, these operatives are not US military, so the US pledge to have “no boots on the ground” has not been violated.

Cole writes:

The slow, cautious war of attrition from the air against Qaddafi’s forces that undertake attacks on civilians in rebel-held cities will continue. Qaddafi’s closest associates are fleeing from Tripoli in terror of being held accountable for his crimes against humanity when his regime ultimately falls.

Some of these developments on Thursday drew howls of outrage from hawks such as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, which is how you know that they are promising developments. It is better that the intervention in Libya not be branded a US one, but rather be seen as the effort of the 28 nations of NATO plus the Arab League.

Following the change in Libya, it is not too early to look northward toward Israel. Knowing of Juan Cole’s support for the Palestinian struggle, it would be assumed he would be even more enthusiastic over a non-violent, second intervention in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

If Libya does stabilize, President Obama will be on a roll, all the more reason he could decide he will not need congressional backup to end Israel’s irresponsible domination of the region.

Robert Burns,  the Washington-based National Security Writer for the Associated Press, described the disappointment of members of Congress who had earlier supported the President’s decision to engage in the air war.

“Odd,” “troubling” and “unnerving” were among critical comments by senators pressing for an explanation of the announcement by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen that American combat missions will end Saturday.

“Your timing is exquisite,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said sarcastically, alluding to Gadhafi’s military advances this week.

Gates and Mullen, in back-to-back appearances before the House and Senate armed services committees, also forcefully argued against putting the U.S. in the role of arming or training Libyan rebel forces, while suggesting it might be a job for Arab or other countries.

We can be certain that Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is watching to see if the Libyan intervention ends as a “success”. From his perspective, “success” would be measured by its impact on Israel. Because these uprisings are a new phenomenon, Netanyahu is apprehensive about what to expect next  from the Arab Spring.

Israel’s greatest fear is that the Palestinian civil society within Israel, and in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, will continue to expand and gain confidence.

Ramzy Baroud, editor of the Palestine Chronicle, describes what it is about the growing impact of civil society that frightens Israel’s leaders.

.   .    .The concept of civil society is often used as a meeting point between other forces, including a healthy and fully functional state. In the Palestinian scenario, however, with the occupation, siege and regular assassinations and imprisonments of political leaders, such a state is missing.

This reality has skewed the traditional balance, resulting in a political void engineered by Israel to de-legitimize Palestinian demands and rights. It is most impressive, to say the least, that representatives of Palestinian civil society have managed to step up and fill the void.

This success would have never been possible without individuals from international civil society, including Rachel Corrie, the Turkish heroes aboard the Mavi Marmara, and the many Israeli activists and organisations who are currently being targeted by the rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman.

Israel has shown alarm over the growing importance of civil society by reacting on many fronts. In Palestine, it has imprisoned Palestinian non-violent resisters. In Israel, it has cracked down on funds received by Israeli human rights groups. And internationally, it has pushed forward a media campaign of defamation.

In September, the United Nations will consider a proposal to make the State of Palestine a UN member in full standing. The new state would include all of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The New York Times calls this vote  “a move that could place Israel into a diplomatic vise”.

Why? Because Israel would be occupying land belonging to a fellow United Nations member, an ugly and brutal reality called The Occupation.

Palestinian civil society has been steadily building toward this UN vote through non-violent actions during a period when the US indulged Israel as a rich parent might indulge a spoiled child, with generous gifts of military funding and protective political cover.

The Palestinian Authority cabinet, headed by Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, pictured right, has worked with international civil rights groups and governments, to urge support for a Palestinian state.

At last count, 112 members of the UN have endorsed a Palestinian state, a result achieved by the efforts of the PA, in spite of the occupation, to build a government structure which has gained the trust of the international community. For more on the PA plan developed under Fayyad’s direction,  click here for Elizabeth Braw’s Huffington Post interview with the prime minister.

Fayyad’s program was published in 2009 under the optimistic title, “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State.”

At the time, as I wrote in Wall Writings, September 9, 2009, Palestinian Journalist Daoud Kuttub described the plan as “brilliant”.

What impressed Kuttub, as he wrote at the time in Huffington Post, was the fact that:

Palestinians have finally started to act in a different way. Instead of cursing the occupation, the new strategy is aimed at building up the desired Palestinian state. The idea is to force the Israelis to the negotiating table rather than beg them to come. The way to do that is to work for a state as if there were negotiations.

Fayyad’s plan has received strong international support through the “boycott, divestment and sanctions” (BDS) movement, which has given international activist groups a tangible way to support the creation of a Palestinian state. This movement began in Palestine in 2005,  modeled after the successful anti-apartheid campaign in South Africa.

Israel’s leaders see, and fear, this tangible non-violent resistance to the occupation. American church leaders are familiar with this fear, as anyone within the churches can testify.

The moment any church body decides to embrace BDS as a non-violent tactic, or even suggests a conversation on the issue, Israel’s US supporters show up at the church door armed with their Hasbara (propaganda) weapons of attack, an arsenal which always includes a dash of Holocaust guilt and the ever present threat to play the”anti-semitic” card.

Ramzy Baroud writes that Israel’s Hasbara campaign has backfired. Instead of de-legitimizing a future Palestinian state,

.  .  .   it is the Israeli occupation that is now being de-legitimized, its own government that is being isolated, and its own country’s reputation that is constantly compromised. The power of civil society has indeed surpassed that of military hardware, archaic and exclusivist historical discourses, propaganda and political coercion.

The Palestinian civil society uprising is an uprising which President Obama must embrace. The President showed caution and wisdom in his limited use of force in Libya. In confronting Israel he does not need to rely on the force of arms. What he does need is the power of a non-violent movement designed to eradicate injustice.

Israel’s occupation has been de-legitimized, its own government increasingly isolated, and its own country’s reputation has been compromised.  It is for Israel’s own good that President Obama must support Palestinian civil society and bring a permanent end to Israel’s illegal and immoral military occupation.

The Arab Spring is all about overthrowing the forces of oppression, wherever and in whatever form these forces exist.  Israel’s occupation is one of these forces of oppression. End it, Mr. President, end it peacefully.

The picture of President Obama is by Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images. It is from the Shadow Government blog on the Foreign Policy web site.

The photo of graffiti art by Banksy on the Palestinian side of Israel’s separation wall, is in the East Jerusalem district of ar-Ram. The photograph is by William Parry, whose book Against the Wall: The Art of Resistance in Palestine will be published in the US by Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press this spring.

by James M. Wall

In 1968, American civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin wrote,

“We would be mistaken to think that the only desires of young Negroes today are to have a job, to have a decent house, to be well educated, to have medical care.

All these things are very important, but deeper and more profound is the feeling of young Negroes today—through all classes, from the lumpenproletariat to the working poor, the working classes, the middle classes, and the intelligentsia—that the time has come when they should have power, a voice in the solution of problems which affect them.”

Helene Cobban, for many years the Middle East foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, recently found this Rustin passage, which she described  as a “great, short piece of writing by the African-American, gay, Quaker activist”.

The passage was written by Rustin for his 1968 book, Down the Line. Rustin came to Cobban by way of Egypt, specifically from the Egyptian blog, Baheyya.

The connection between the aspiration of Palestinians today and the American civil rights struggle, was described by Laila El-Haddad, the author of a recent book, Gaza Mom:

What the Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from is not restrictions on their food, it is restrictions on their freedom!

In her Cairo-based blog, along with the Rustin quote, the blogger Baheyya included the picture below of a large crowd of protestors in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The protestors were demanding an end to social inequality, vote rigging, and the chokehold of president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s ruling party. I like to think Bayard Rustin would approve. 

From Rustin to Baheyya to El Haddad to Cobban, the connections demand to be heard. The writer of Baheyya, by the way, explains in her blog profile that she chose the title of her blog because:

“Baheyya is an Egyptian female name that has come to stand in for Egypt itself. The symbolism of course is the handiwork of the gifted duo of Shaykh Imam Eissa and Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm in their haunting song, ‘Masr yamma, ya Baheyya.'”

Masr yamma, ya Baheyya, according to one source I consulted, may be translated into English as Egypt, O Mother, you are Glorious.

Another source informs me that in her research she found:

The poet stated in an introduction to this poem that he has drawn/designed his poem after his mother or literally he was in fact drawing his mother.  He also stated a famous saying that goes, “it was a sweets chef who constructed Egypt” (literally: the one who constructed Egypt was a sweets chef).

The connection between the American civil rights movement and the current uprisings across the Arab world, is inescapable. Does the President hear, and more importantly, feel, this connection?

Lamis Andoni has followed President Obama before, and since, his 2008 election. She writes from Doha, Qatar, where she is currently a Middle East consultant for Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based news station. She also writes for the Washington Post Global blog.

Andoni has covered  the Middle East for 20 years for the Christian Science Monitor, the Financial Times and major newspapers in Jordan. She has also been a professor at the Graduate School in UC Berkeley.

In a Washington Post blog column, on January 23, 2009, Adoni wrote that she believed the new president had a better understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian issue than earlier presidents.

She was, however, concerned about the young president’s first steps in the Middle East. She called her posting: “Don’t Endorse Israel’s War”.

The inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African-American President, is itself an inspiration of hope for a better world. It has sent a message of goodwill even to the most skeptical spectators around the globe. But he can easily shatter people’s glimmer of hope if he does not really and truly break away from an American foreign policy of ruthless hegemony imposed by ruthless military force.

His reaction to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis will be the first and most important test of the change he has promised to bring. His biggest blunder would be to reinforce America’s full-fledged support of Israel, especially after the Israeli war of destruction on Gaza.

Two years later, in a speech the President gave at a Miami, Florida Democratic party fund raiser March 4, his “full-fledged support of Israel” was all too evident. This is not what people seeking freedom wanted to hear.

In his remarks, Obama said:

[W]hen you look at what’s happening across the — around the world, what’s happening in the Middle East is a manifestation of new technologies, the winds of freedom that are blowing through countries that have not felt those winds in decades, a whole new generation that says, I want to be a part of this larger world and I want to have some say in what happens.

Now, that’s a dangerous time, but it’s also a huge opportunity for us, because America is built on liberty and innovation and dynamism and technology. And all the forces that we’re seeing at work in Egypt are forces that naturally should be aligned with us, should be aligned with Israel, if — if — we make good decisions now and we understand sort of the sweep of history.

It is very difficult to understand how the President could conclude that the forces at work in Egypt are forces that “naturally should be aligned with us”, and should “be aligned with Israel”. The evidence is overwhelmingly against such a conclusion.

In her Al Jazeera response to Obama’s Miami fund-raising speech, Lamis Adoni wrote that the pro-western Arab dictators and royal rulers across the Middle East have always sought to appease their publics “by paying lip service to the Palestinian cause, because they understand the place [that cause] holds in the Arab psyche.”

The current Arab revolutions, however, have revealed that “lip service” is no longer sufficient.

It is wrong to assume that the new Arab mood is somehow consistent with a friendlier posture towards a country that continues to occupy Palestinian land and to dispossess Palestinian people.

This kind of misreading of the situation derives not from facts but from an Orientalist attitude that has long dominated American thinking and large sections of the American media.

In the prevailing US political culture, supporting Washington’s policies is considered synonymous with democratic thinking and behaviour, while opposing the American outlook and Israel is judged to derive from the backwardness of ‘captive minds’.

According to this perspective, a mentality of imagined victimhood feeds ‘hatred’ of and resistance towards Israel.

But, it is, in fact, this thinking that is utterly undemocratic. If we assume that democratic values are universal values and move away from a Western ethno-centric interpretation, we will find that the rejection of occupation is totally consistent with ideas of freedom and human dignity – two supposedly integral components of democratic thought.

Just as rejecting racial discrimination asserts a belief in freedom, so does the refusal to simply accept the Israeli and American occupations of Arab lands and subordination of Arab people.

So unless Obama is talking about ending the US occupation of Iraq and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, why would he imagine that the Arab revolutionaries who rose against their oppressors would be natural allies of the US?

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian journalist from Cairo. In a piece he wrote for the London Guardian, March 2, he examines recent history and traces the growth of the Egyptian revolution.

He concludes that the revolution the Arabs are conducting for their own personal freedom is directly related to the growing outrage younger protestors feel about the treatment of the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

I recall the first time I heard protesters en masse chanting against [President Mubarak] in April 2002, during the pro-Palestinian riots around Cairo University. Battling the notorious central security forces, protesters were chanting in Arabic: “Hosni Mubarak is just like [Ariel] Sharon.”

The anger was to explode on an even larger scale with the outbreak of the war on Iraq in March 2003. More than 30,000 Egyptians fought the police in downtown Cairo, briefly taking over Tahrir Square, and burning down Mubarak’s billboard.

The scenes aired by al-Jazeera and other satellite networks of the Palestinian revolt or the US-led onslaught on Iraq inspired activists across Egypt to pull down the wall of fear brick by brick. . . . .

In April 2008, a mini revolt took place in the city of Mahalla over the price of bread. Security forces put down the uprising in two days, leaving at least three dead and hundreds detained and tortured.

The scenes from what became known as the “Mahalla intifada” could have constituted a dress rehearsal for what happened in 2011, with protesters taking down Mubarak’s posters, battling the police troops in the streets, and challenging the symbols of the much-hated National Democratic party. . . . .

The uprising that started on 25 January 2011 was the result of a long process in which the wall of fear fell, bit by bit. The key to it all was that the actions on the ground were visually transmitted to the widest possible audience.

Nothing aids the erosion of one’s fear more than knowing there are others, somewhere else, who share the same desire for liberation – and have started taking action.

The photo of Sanaa protestors in Yemen, is from the Associated Press. It ran on the Baheyya blog.

by James M. Wall

Professor Fawaz A. Gerges explained why Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu tried to use his considerable political muscle in a failed effort to keep Hosni Mubarak in power.

Gerges, who teaches Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, described the Arab uprising for BBC New Middle East :

Regionally, Israel is the biggest loser. It has put all its eggs into the basket of Arab dictators and autocrats, like Egypt’s deposed Hosni Mubarak. Israel fought tooth and nail to support Mr Mubarak, who played a key role in tightening the siege of Gaza and the noose around Hamas’s neck.

Few members of the US Congress would agree with Professor Gerges. A large majority of the Congress sees nothing wrong with automatically approving an annual $3 billion contribution to the government of Israel, the responsible party to that “siege of Gaza”.

A recent debate in New York City’s New School featured two Democratic Party antagonists on the Israel/Palestine issue: Brian Baird, the former Washington state congressman, and Brooklyn congressman Anthony Weiner.

Philip Weiss described the debate for Mondoweiss:

The conversation was deftly moderated by Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who was not afraid to call Weiner out when the congressman said there are no Israeli soldiers in the West Bank, or when he said that all the settlements are in Israel.

The chief response to the debate so far (besides the predictable at the National Review) has been shock at Anthony Weiner’s contempt for international law and Palestinian humanity.

A politician who has distinguished himself on healthcare reform and economic justice issues in the US, resorts to “It’s war, and war is hell” arguments when Baird, a clinical psychologist by training, describes the destruction of schools and innocent families and U.N. compounds by Israeli bombing, and the collective punishment of millions of people denied lentils, toothpaste, building materials, and the freedom to move beyond a territory less than the size of New York City.

Weiner’s obvious lack of information about the West Bank and Gaza was in sharp contrast to Baird’s informed passion over the issue. This wide gap between Weiner and Baird  illustrates why there is such a desperate need in this country for Egyptian American journalist Mona Eltahawy.

Eltahawy is a columnist based in New York who writes for Canada’s Toronto Star, Israel’s The Jerusalem Report and Denmark’s Politiken. Her opinion pieces have been published in The Washington Post and the International Herald Tribune.

Before moving to the U.S. in 2000, Eltahawy was a news reporter in the Middle East for many years, and worked in Cairo and Jerusalem as a Reuters correspondent. She has also reported for various media from Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Libya, Syria, Saudi Arabia and China.

Eltahawy was all over the media during the Egyptian uprising, on one occasion confronting Alan Dershowitz on CNN.

In an appearance with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Feb 1, Eltahawy talked about her conversation with Dershowitz, and about her effort to convince American media to stop calling the uprising in Egypt a “crisis”.  It was not a crisis, she pointed out. For Egyptians, it was an opportunity.

Two months before the Egyptian uprising the US Congress experienced its own major upheaval. Republicans took over the House while Democrats experienced a reduction in its control of the Senate.

Where Israel is concerned, parties don’t matter much. Both Republicans and Democrats march to the drumbeat of the Israel Lobby. There were, however, a large number of new members elected in 2010.

Which explains why AIPAC was concerned about those Republican first-termers, many of them backed by the Tea Party. AIPAC  knew that these tea partiers were extreme fiscal conservatives who were determined to attack the federal budget from top to bottom.

In a recent Huffington Post essay, MJ Rosenberg described how AIPAC dealt with the problem:

Shortly after the election, AIPAC produced a letter for all those new Republican members to sign in which they pledged that, no matter what else they cut, Israel would be exempt. And almost immediately, 65 of the 87 Republican freshmen signed on. (More signed on later).

Among the signatories are some of the most vehement supporters of cutting virtually every domestic program. These are people who support cutting jobs in their own districts and proudly point to their devotion to the principle that shared sacrifice means everyone. But not Israel.

In its lockstep response to AIPAC,  Congress appears incapable of grasping the full significance of the Arab uprising. They need to listen to Rashid Khalidi, who calls the uprising a “sea change”.

In a recent Nation column,  Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, describes that “sea change” as a major shift in perceptions about Arabs, Muslims and Middle Easterners.

Suddenly, to be an Arab has become a good thing. People all over the Arab world feel a sense of pride in shaking off decades of cowed passivity under dictatorships that ruled with no deference to popular wishes. . . .  Before, when anything Muslim or Middle Eastern or Arab was reported on, it was almost always with a heavy negative connotation.

Now, during this Arab spring this has ceased to be the case. An area that was a byword for political stagnation is witnessing a rapid transformation that has caught the attention of the world.

Khalidi writes that this “sea change” shift in perception shows

how superficial, and how false, were most Western media images of this region. Virtually all we heard about were the ubiquitous terrorists, the omnipresent bearded radicals and their veiled companions trying to impose Sharia and the corrupt, brutal despots who were the only option for control of such undesirables.

In US government-speak, faithfully repeated by the mainstream media, most of that corruption and brutality was airbrushed out through the use of mendacious terms like “moderates” (i.e., those who do and say what we want). That locution, and the one used to denigrate the people of the region, “the Arab street,” should now be permanently retired.

Khalidi cautions us to be aware that this shift in perception of the region remains “very fragile”

Even if all the Arab despots are overthrown, there is an enormous investment in the “us versus them” view of the region.

This includes not only entire bureaucratic empires engaged in fighting the “war on terror,” not only the industries that supply this war and the battalions of contractors and consultants so generously rewarded for their services in it; it also includes a large ideological archipelago of faux expertise, with vast shoals of “terrorologists” deeply committed to propagating this caricature of the Middle East. . . .

They are the ones who systematically taught Americans not to see the real Arab world: the unions, those with a commitment to the rule of law, the tech-savvy young people, the feminists, the artists and intellectuals, those with a reasonable knowledge of Western culture and values, the ordinary people who simply want decent opportunities and a voice in how they are governed.

Khalidi concludes with this sober reminder:

Things could easily and very quickly change for the worse in the Arab world, and that could rapidly erode these tender new perceptions. Nothing has yet been resolved in any Arab country, not even in Tunisia or Egypt, where the despots are gone but a real transformation has barely begun.

Who in the region benefits from holding on to the false views of Arabs?  First in a long line is the current government of the state of Israel and its many friends in America.,

During the Egyptian uprising Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu put heavy pressure on the US to keep Hosni Muburak in power. Netanyahu instructed his supporters in the US Congress to warn President Obama that Mubarak’s fall would lead to dire consequences for the region.

In an effort to break from the policies of the current right wing Israeli government, many liberals have rallied around the banner of J Street, the “pro Israel, pro peace” alternative to the Israel Lobby.

At this year’s third annual Washington Conference, J Street attracted more than 2000 enthused participants who cheered speakers, some of whom were critical of Israel. However, right on cue, when the final conference statement was released, it cast its vote for an Israel determined to control the region by military power alone.

Just weeks after the start of the Arab uprising toward freedom and justice, J Street repeated the mantra: Nothing must be done to threaten that ten year guarantee of military aid from US taxpayers to Israel.

That guarantee comes from a Bush era contract that runs from 2007 to 2018, a total of $30 billion from the US to Israel, at $3 billion a year. That would be $3 billion a year from a US economy that is woefully cash-strapped.

Many of my liberal friends swear by J Street.  They see it as the only hope for peace. I have to agree that J Street is an attractive alternative to AIPAC. Nevertheless, it advocates a militaristic alternative which in the present hopeful climate, is self-defeating.

The Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy rejects that militaristic alternative. The organizers of the J Street conference had to know of Eltahawy’s passionate views about Middle East governments that exercise tight control over the Arab populations.  So it is very much to J Street’s credit that it gave Eltahawy a place on its program.

When Eltahawy laid out the history and the significance of the various uprisings by a new generation of Arabs she was greeted enthusiastically by the J Streeters.

Finally, we move from the young prophetic voice of Mona Eltahawy to the wisdom of Israeli activist Uri Avnery, still going at 87, who began his March 5 column:

Of all the memorable phrases uttered by Barack Obama in the last two years, the one that stuck in my mind more than any other appeared in his historic speech in Cairo in the early days of his term. He warned the nations not to place themselves “on the wrong side of history.”

It seems that the Arab nations took heed of this advice more than he might have anticipated. In the last few weeks they jumped from the wrong to the right side of history. And what a jump it was!

The picture at the top shows a sign that depicts in Arabic and English, the day of liberation in Egypt. It was taken in Cairo for Reuters by Peter Andrews. The picture ran in the London Guardian.

by James M. Wall

The US has cast its first Obama UN veto, rejecting a Security Council resolution which would have condemned Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories “as an obstacle to peace”.

The BBC reported that “all 14 other members of the Security Council backed the resolution, which had been endorsed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation.”

A top Fatah leader and former Palestinian intelligence official, Tawfik Tirawi, told the Palestinian newspaper Ma’an that the veto “amounted to ‘blackmail”. He said it exposed the true face of America as well as the extent to which its role in the Middle East peace process harmed Palestinian interests.

In Jerusalem, Ha’aretz provided the official Israeli response:

Israel said it was deeply grateful to the United States after it vetoed a United Nations resolution put forward by the Palestinian leadership condemning Israeli settlement activity. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said in a statement, “Israel deeply appreciates the decision by President Obama to veto the Security Council Resolution”.

Ha’aretz columnist Gideon Levy spoke for a different segment of Israeli society:

This weekend, a new member enrolled in Likud – and not just in the ruling party, but in its most hawkish wing. . . .The first veto cast by the United States during Obama’s term, a veto he promised in vain not to use as his predecessors did, was a veto against the chance and promise of change, a veto against hope. This is a veto that is not friendly to Israel; it supports the settlers and the Israeli right, and them alone.

Ambassador Susan Rice tried to explain the veto in her statement to the Security Council. She said that even though the US vetoed the resolution,

“[the US still rejects] in the strongest terms the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity. For more than four decades, Israeli settlement activity in territories occupied in 1967 has undermined Israel’s security and corroded hopes for peace and stability in the region.

Continued settlement activity violates Israel’s international commitments, devastates trust between the parties, and threatens the prospects for peace….While we agree with our fellow Council members—and indeed, with the wider world—about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity, we think it unwise for this Council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians. We therefore regrettably have opposed this draft resolution.”

Phyllis Bennis reacted to Rice’s statement in AlterNet

Ambassador Susan Rice’s statement was astonishingly defensive – she went to great lengths to claim that the U.S. actually agrees with the resolution, that no one has done more than the U.S. to support a two-state solution, that the U.S. thinks settlement activity (not, we should note, the continuing existence of longstanding settlements now home to 500,000 illegal Jewish settlers in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem) violates Israel’s international commitments and more.

She tried to convince the world that “opposition to the resolution should not be misunderstood” to mean the U.S. supports settlement activity – only that the Obama administration “thinks it unwise” for the United Nations to try to stop that settlement activity.

She defined settlements as one of the “core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians,” not as a violation of international law and a host of specific UN resolutions. Therefore, she claimed, the issue was just one of the wrong venues for this debate.

We’re really against settlements, she pleaded, we just want to end them OUR way. On OUR terms. In OUR peace talks.

And we all know how well that’s gone so far.

In a recent Huffington Post essay written before the veto, Ussama Makdisi, whose latest book is Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promises of US-Arab Relations: 1820-2001, asks: “Why is the US afraid of Arab democracy?”

It is a good question from the Rice University, Palestinian American scholar, who is a member of a distinguished family that includes Makdisi’s uncle, Edward Said.

Makdisi was responding to the “outrage of the people” of the Middle East over what is “more than a revolution in Arab affairs”.

Although [this outrage is] unquestionably first and foremost a revolt against unpopular and illegitimate governments and the economic and political despair these governments have engendered, the mass protests are also a revolt against American foreign policy itself.

For decades, successive U.S. Republican and Democratic administrations have supported repressive Arab regimes in the name of the “stability” of a strategic, oil-rich region. This discourse of stability rationalized repression of Arab citizens.

The US veto of the UN anti-settlement resolution is jarringly out of step with the demand for democracy from Middle East Arabs, including Palestinians. The old order is rapidly changing.

That demand has been received with enthusiasm by progressives and freedom loving Americans. The enthusiasm  is muted, however, among US conservatives and among PEPs (Progressive Except for Palestine) in the American government and other ruling elites.

The source of that reluctance is no surprise. The Media Line: The MidEast Media News Source reports on reactions from Israel, under the headline, “Israel to World: Don’t Be So Fast to Push Democracy on Middle East”.

I kid you not, that is the headline.  See the full report for yourself, by clicking on the Media Line title above.

While touting its own democratic credentials, Israel has been warning the world not to let experiments in democracy spread across the Middle East, lest Islamic fundamentalists are voted in.

“We don’t want to stay the only democracy in the Middle East. We would love to live in a neighborhood where all countries are democratic. But is it feasible now?” Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor said in an interview with The Media Line.

Israel’s response to the current Arab uprising in the region is consistent with the way Israel responded to the February, 2006 Parliamentary democratic elections in Palestine, an election only reluctantly agreed to by Israel. The US assumed Fatah would win the election in both the West Bank and Gaza.

This 2006 Arab democracy experiment in Israel’s immediate neighborhood delivered these unexpected (to the US) results:

Hamas won 74 Parliament seats out of 132, while the then-ruling party, Fatah, won 45 seats.  In any democratic election, that is a victory for Hamas. International observers, including a team organized by President Jimmy Carter, reported that the election was conducted fairly.

This information on the results of the 2006 elections won by Hamas is from The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict, edited by Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner and Philip Weiss.

This book includes an introduction by Naomi Klein, along with major sections from the Report and additional essays providing context of Israel’s 2008-09 invasion of Gaza.

And just what was Israel’s 2007 response to Arab democracy in its neighborhood? More than half of the elected Hamas Parliament members were thrown into Israeli jails. Israel, the US and the EU imposed economic sanctions on Gaza, after a US-Israel organized and sponsored Fatah coup failed to overthrow Gaza’s Hamas government.

That economic sanction on Gaza has been enforced by Israel with the consistent cooperation of President Mubarak’s Egyptian government. The sanctions have crippled the Gaza economy and punished its population.

Now, Gaza’s southern flank is guarded by Mubarak’s replacement government, an army leadership which has promised to hold democratic elections. Will the US join Israel in putting pressure on Egypt’s emerging government to continue to seal off Gaza’s southern border?

Ussama Makdisi concludes his recent Huffington Post essay on the current demand for democracy in the Middle East, with an analysis that would encourage the White House if only the President would listen to scholars like Makdisi, who operate beyond the Washington beltway.

As events in Egypt have demonstrated, Arab autocrats will not abdicate willingly. But ordinary people insist on real change. Mubarak’s sudden downfall is a testament to the strength of a human desire for dignity.

Because its hegemony in the Middle East has been so unpopular, the United States may soon have to confront a day of reckoning when Arabs finally achieve their democratic rights.

The irony is that the idea of self-determination began with an American president, Woodrow Wilson. Yet this idea has been systematically betrayed by the US in the Middle East since 1947.

2011 may well mark the beginning of the end of corrupt Arab regimes. And with the fall of these regimes there will be an opportunity to build not only a free Arab world, but an American foreign policy that supports this powerful current, and not, as it has done for decades, stand in its way.

Presidential leadership will be required to redirect US policy toward what Makdisi terms, “this powerful current”. President Obama will be conducting this struggle on his own.  He cannot expect any support from the US Congress.

He will need strong citizen support.  He will also need help from progressive politicians and religious communities. This would be a good time for PEPs (Progessive Except for Palestine) to respond to Middle East demands for real democracy.

In the picture at top, taken on the day the US vetoed the UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements, Palestinian teenagers are shown looking at the exclusive Jewish settlement of Modiin in the West Bank. The picture is from the BBC web site.  It is an Associated Press photo.

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