KEEPING PALESTINE OFF MY PLATE
Obama knows for sure that Israel controls U.S. policy in the Middle East and he's not going to mess with the problem in the early days of his Presidency. Any attempt to deal fairly with the survivors of Israel's holocaust attack on Gaza will be seen as a threat by AIPAC, who will call all their supporters in Congress into immediate action. The House voted 390 to 15 and the Senate unanimously last week to support the IDF - 4th largest land army in the world – in its invasion of a defenseless ghetto. Not one other government in the world supports Israel's actions. Keeping 1.5 million refugees packed into the tiny Gaza enclave for 60 years and never even discussing a permanent solution is very hard to imagine, yet no one seems to question it in Washington. So, given how the deck is stacked, what does Obama do in his first week?

1.Appoints the aging and benign George Mitchell as our Middle East Envoy with the authority to at least keep the lid on in Gaza for the time being. As Jim Lobe points out in LobeLog.com 1/22/09, neither AIPAC nor WINEP (Washington Institute on Near East Policy) can challenge the Nobel laureate's reputation as a peace maker after his work in North Ireland.
2.Makes telephone calls to our client states: President Mubarrak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Jordan, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, Prime Minister Olmert of Israel, and Mohammed Abbas of the Palestine Authority to affirm their privileged status - another sign that Obama is sticking to traditional approaches.
3.Charges Mitchell with ensuring that the very shaky “informal ceasefire between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas in the Gaza Strip becomes durable and sustainable”.

However, news reports from the Arab world seem to contradict all of Obama's impressions of what is going on:
Patrick Cockburn writing in The Independent 1/23/09 quotes Prince Turki al-Faisal of the Saudi ruling family that: “Bush had left a sickening legacy in the Middle East and had contributed through arrogance to Israel's slaughter of innocent people in Gaza over the past month. If the United States wants to continue playing a leadership role in the Middle East and keep its strategic alliances intact ... it will have to revise drastically its policies vis a vis Israel and Palestine".
Cockburn goes on: “The sharp decline in support for Fatah and the discrediting of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, because of his inertia during the 22-day Gaza war, will make it very difficult for the US and the EU to pretend that Fatah are the true representatives of the Palestinian community. The international community is likely to find it impossible to marginalize Hamas in reconstructing Gaza.” Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister of planning points out that: “Hamas has been highly successful in portraying itself as the party of resistance.” He adds that: “Mr Abbas was badly damaged in the eyes of Palestinians when he blamed Hamas for Israel's assault on Gaza in the conflict's first two days.”
Robert Fisk writes in the Independent 1/23/09: “There was the phone call yesterday from President Obama to Mahmoud Abbas. Maybe Obama thinks Abbas is the leader of the Palestinians, but as every Arab knows, except perhaps Mr Abbas, he is the leader of a ghost government, a near-corpse only kept alive with the blood transfusion of international support and the 'full partnership' Obama has apparently offered him, whatever 'full' means.

President Obama's remarks to State Department employees on Thursday, 1/23/09 included the following: “For years, Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at innocent Israeli citizens.” (Fact check: there were 3050 rocket attacks from Gaza from 2001 through 2008 years killing 15 Israelis in total. The combined air and land attacks by the IDF over these past 22 days have killed 1330 civilians including 437 children.) “No democracy can tolerate such danger to its people (he means here only Israelis) nor should the international community, and neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror.” Nowhere has he suggested that Israel's massive bombings of densely packed civilian ghettos in Gaza City and Rafah were intolerable, nor that dropping white phosphorous in these cities was an act of terror.

Prime Minister Olmert of Israel is on his way to jail for corruption just as soon as the Israelis vote the very right-wing Bebe Netanyahu back into power on February 10th, so that phone call by Obama to Olmert was probably wasted effort. Netanyahu, whose arrogance had thoroughly annoyed Bill Clinton a decade ago, will now have an opportunity to work his charms on Hillary. Perhaps this experience will begin to awaken Obama to the futility of playing nice with those who fail to see Palestinians as human beings.