Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation, November 6, 2009
The announcement by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that he will not run for reelection is the exclamation point on the utter collapse of the Obama adminstration’s Middle East policy. Launched to great expectations — the appointment of George Mitchell, Obama’s Cairo declaration that the plight of the Palestinians is intolerable — it is now in complete disarray. It is, without doubt, the first major defeat for Obama’s hope-and-change foreign policy.
Tags: Goldstone Report on Gaza, illegal settlements, Israel, Mahmoud Abbas, Obama adminstration's Middle East policy, Obama and Netanyahu, Robert Dreyfuss
Peace and Justice Post 
November 7, 2009 at 11:04 pm |
You have elucidated very clearly, Mr. Robert Dreyfuss, the sequence of events that sprouted in hope in Egypt with President Obama’s speech, grew into a sapling amidst the Zionists in the White House, blossomed into a fiasco in Jerusalem with Mrs. Clinton’s inordinate praise of Netanyahu’s intransigence, and finally wilted at the Arab foreign ministers’ conference in Morocco. President Obama’s roadmap for peace has met Netanyahu’s road-block.
I have heard with great interest Obama’s words, and watched his actions with a sinking feeling in my heart, regarding his plan for peace in the Middle East. Reluctantly, I have come to the conclusion that mere negotiations will not resolve this deep-rooted conflict. Forty years’ negotiations have culminated in the tragedy and horrors of the Gaza War; forty more years of negotiations will also fail to resolve this conflict. We need only to look at history: what happened in South Africa. Forty years of diplomacy and negotiations, including Ronald Reagan’s “quiet diplomacy” did not end South Africa’s apartheid; only the world-wide economic embargo, sanctioned by the UN, ended the apartheid that flourished for 46 years from1948 to 1994. Israel’s apartheid against the Palestinians will also end only when the “boycott Israel” movement gathers momentum and spreads around the world. I am aware that the UN will not pass any resolution against Israel because Obama will most certainly veto it. The “Boycott Israel” movement seems to be gathering momentum around the world, and sooner or later the tide will turn for the Palestinians.
I have read a wonderful article by Prof. Richard Falk, titled: Why the Goldstone Report matters. In it he says essentially what I have said, that the Israel-Palestine conflict will end only through the imposition of an economic embargo or a boycott: “Its (Goldstone Report’s) impact will be felt most impressively on the growing civil society movement throughout the world to impose cultural, sporting, and academic boycotts, as well as to discourage investment, trade, and tourism with Israel. It may yet be the case that as in the anti-apartheid struggle the shift in the relation of forces in the Palestinian favor will occur not through diplomacy or as a result of armed resistance, but on the symbolic battlefield of legitimacy that has become global in scope, what might be described as the new political relevance of moral and legal globalization.”
I enjoyed reading your article also.
Yesh Prabhu, Plainsboro, NJ
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