Category Archives: Barack Obama

Partial troop withdrawal from Afghanistan

CBS News reports:

President Obama on Wednesday night informed the nation of his plans to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by fall of next year, marking the beginning of the end of an increasingly unpopular war.

“The tide of war is receding,” Mr. Obama said from the White House, promising that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will both come to a “responsible end.”

Ten thousand troops will leave Afghanistan by the end of this year, the president announced, with another 23,000 leaving no later than September 2012. That would leave roughly 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan to continue the decade-long war.

The New York Times reports:

[T]here are two reasons American planners hope to negotiate with the government of President Hamid Karzai an agreement to keep upward of 25,000 American forces in Afghanistan, even after the 30,000 “surge” troops are withdrawn over the next 14 months, and tens of thousands of more by the end of 2014.

Their first is to assure that Afghanistan never again becomes a base for attacks on the United States. But the more urgent reason is Pakistan. In his speech, Mr. Obama invited Pakistan to expand its peaceful cooperation in the region, but he also noted that Pakistan must live up to its commitments and that “the U.S. will never tolerate a safe haven for those who would destroy us.”

Pakistan has already made it clear, however, that it will never allow American forces to be based there. As relations have turned more hostile with the United States in recent months, it has refused to issue visas to large numbers of C.I.A. officers and seems to be moving quickly to close the American drone base in Shamsi, Pakistan.

For their part, administration officials make it clearer than ever that they view Pakistan’s harboring of terrorist groups as the more urgent problem. “We don’t see a transnational threat coming out of Afghanistan,” a senior administration official said Wednesday in briefing reporters before the president’s speech. Later he added, “The threat has come from Pakistan.”

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What have Obama and Netanyahu wrought?

Henry Siegman writes:

What conclusions are to be drawn about the state of Middle East peacemaking from the extraordinary spectacle of the adversarial encounter between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and their several major adversarial addresses in the second half of May?

The spectacle did not bring an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement any closer. Indeed, Netanyahu’s address to the U.S. Congress, no less than Congress’s reaction to that speech, effectively buried the Middle East peace process for good. For what America’s solons were jumping up and down to applaud so wildly as they pandered pathetically to the Israel lobby was Netanyahu’s rejection of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, thus endorsing his determination to maintain permanently Israel’s colonial project in the West Bank.

If Netanyahu succeeds in his objective, these members of Congress will be able to take credit for an Israeli apartheid regime that former Prime Ministers Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Ehud Olmert predicted would be the inescapable consequence of policies the congressmen cheered and promised to continue to support as generously as they have in the past.

Unfortunately, it is an outcome made more likely by Obama’s insistence that a United Nations resolution could never bring about Palestinian statehood. He was wrong about that. That the United Nations can create a state was affirmed and celebrated not by enemies of Israel but in Israel’s own Declaration of Independence of 1948. It is the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947, not negotiations between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine, that is cited in that declaration as having brought about the state of Israel and the source of its legitimacy.

It is the United Nations, not Netanyahu nor even the United States, that can and should bring the state of Palestine into being — and would do so if the United States were not to prevent it. The bilateral talks with Netanyahu that Obama is insisting Palestinians return to will only continue to serve, as they have in the past, as cover for the expansion of Israeli settlements whose purpose it is to annex (i.e., steal) enough Palestinian territory to preclude the possibility of Palestinian statehood.

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Democrats launch major pro-Obama pushback among Jews

JTA reports:

President Obama is a stalwart friend of Israel.

That’s the message some top Democratic Jewish figures are promoting to push back against the notion that Obama is out of step with the pro-Israel and Jewish communities.

Within the next two weeks, two figures associated with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — past AIPAC president Amy Friedkin and board member Howard Green — will be among the hosts for a major fundraising event for the president, charging $25,000 per couple. The target of 40 couples — bringing in $1 million — is close to being met, insiders say. Notably, the organizers have received a nod from the AIPAC board’s inner circle to solicit donations.

Last week, top Jewish Democrats, including Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Democratic National Committee chairwoman Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), blitzed the media with Op-Eds denying any split with the president in the wake of his call last month to base Palestinian-Israeli negotiations on 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps.

And the White House has taken the unusual step of posting a lengthy defense of Obama’s Israel record on its website.

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On deaf ears: Obama’s message to Israel

Robert Grenier writes:

Late May’s extraordinary sequence of speeches and meetings involving US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu – and the commentary surrounding it from official circles in both countries – did not make for an edifying interlude. The week beginning May 19 will not be remembered for displays of farsighted statecraft, or high moral courage. What we saw instead was brash, unapologetic chauvinism from Netanyahu, an outright refusal of moral leadership from Obama, and acts of political cowardice and opportunism from the US Congress outrageous even by the low standards of that frequently ignominious body.

But that is not to say that the week’s display was not useful. On the contrary, much of importance was accomplished. Now, more clearly than ever, we can see the future. For if there were any questions remaining about the current nature and direction of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, May’s events have put an end to them. Zionism is far from dead, and will surely survive, at least in altered form. But a fundamental change in the nature of the Israeli state has become inevitable.

To understand why, we should start with President Obama. It may seem mystifying in one so intelligent and insightful, but when, at the beginning of his administration, Obama set about to solve the Arab-Israeli dispute once and for all, he really had no idea what he was getting into. To this most logical, detached, and rational of men, the solution to the dispute must have seemed obvious. The salient issues had been reviewed endlessly for decades by all the parties. The key components of an agreement were well known. All he needed to do to get the negotiating process properly underway, he believed, was to address one key impediment: Israeli settlement policy.

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In the Middle East, who cares what Obama says?

Robert Fisk writes:

This month, in the Middle East, has seen the unmaking of the President of the United States. More than that, it has witnessed the lowest prestige of America in the region since Roosevelt met King Abdul Aziz on the USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake in 1945.

While Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu played out their farce in Washington – Obama grovelling as usual – the Arabs got on with the serious business of changing their world, demonstrating and fighting and dying for freedoms they have never possessed. Obama waffled on about change in the Middle East – and about America’s new role in the region. It was pathetic. “What is this ‘role’ thing?” an Egyptian friend asked me at the weekend. “Do they still believe we care about what they think?”

And it is true. Obama’s failure to support the Arab revolutions until they were all but over lost the US most of its surviving credit in the region. Obama was silent on the overthrow of Ben Ali, only joined in the chorus of contempt for Mubarak two days before his flight, condemned the Syrian regime – which has killed more of its people than any other dynasty in this Arab “spring”, save for the frightful Gaddafi – but makes it clear that he would be happy to see Assad survive, waves his puny fist at puny Bahrain’s cruelty and remains absolutely, stunningly silent over Saudi Arabia. And he goes on his knees before Israel. Is it any wonder, then, that Arabs are turning their backs on America, not out of fury or anger, nor with threats or violence, but with contempt? It is the Arabs and their fellow Muslims of the Middle East who are themselves now making the decisions.

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Can Obama beat the Israel lobby?

Henry Siegman writes:

How one gauges the importance or shortcomings of Barack Obama’s comments on the Israel-Palestine conflict in his speech of May 19 depends on how one understands the history of the Middle East peace process. My take on that history has always reminded me of the gallows humor that used to make the rounds in the Soviet Union: Soviet workers pretend to work, and their Kremlin rulers pretend to pay them. So it has been with the peace process: Israeli governments pretend they are seeking a two-state solution, and the United States pretends it believes them—that is, until President Obama’s latest speech on the subject. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The main agency for the promotion of this deception in the United States has been the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose legitimacy is based on the pretense that it speaks for the American Jewish community. It does not, for the lobby’s commitment is to Israeli governments of a certain right-wing cast.

AIPAC went into virtual hibernation during the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s because he disliked its politics and the notion that an Israeli prime minister needs AIPAC’s intercession to communicate with the US administration. The chemistry between them was so bad that Rabin encouraged the formation of a new American support group, the Israel Policy Forum.

It is not widely known that in 1988 the three major US Jewish “defense” organizations—the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Defamation League—joined in a public challenge to AIPAC (as well as to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations), charging that the policies it advocates do not always represent the views of the American Jewish community. I am familiar with the episode because I served on the executive committee of AIPAC for nearly thirty years—from 1965 to 1994—while heading the Synagogue Council of America and then the American Jewish Congress. As the New York Times reported at the time, the challenge was “politically significant because it suggests that American Jewish opinion is more diverse and, on some issues, less hard-line than the picture presented by AIPAC, which is viewed by Congress and the Administration as an authoritative spokesman for American Jews.” AIPAC managed to neutralize the challenge by promising deeper consultation with the three organizations, which of course it never did.

Today, AIPAC gives full and unqualified support to an Israeli government most of whose members deeply oppose a two-state solution. The lip service that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, pay to such an accord is a cover for their government’s overriding goal of foiling one. In fact, it is a goal that Israeli governments have pursued since 1967, when the Palestinian territories came under Israel’s control. As Aluf Benn of Haaretz noted this April:

Israeli foreign policy has, for the past 44 years, strived to prevent another repetition of this scenario [Israel’s withdrawals from territory beyond its legitimate borders, forced first by President Truman and then by President Eisenhower] through a combination of intransigence and a surrender of territories considered less vital (Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank cities, South Lebanon), in order to keep the major prizes (East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights).

Most members of Netanyahu’s government do not hide their opposition to Palestinian statehood, and they openly advocate Israel’s permanent retention of the occupied territories. Danny Danon, a Likud member and deputy speaker of the Knesset, published an op-ed in the New York Times the day before Netanyahu met with President Obama at the White House, calling on Netanyahu “to rectify the mistake we made in 1967 by failing to annex all of the West Bank.”

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Europe’s Obamaphilia says more about its own weakness than the US president

Gary Younge writes:

In his book Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama described himself as a Rorschach test – the famous psychological experiment where people are shown a series of ink blots and asked to identify what they see in them. There is no right answer. But each response in its own way, is thought to reveal the patient’s obsessions and anxieties.

So it is with Obama. In the last week he has been disparaged as the “most successful food stamp president in history” by Newt Gingrich and a spineless “black mascot” of Wall Street by the prominent black academic Cornel West.

“I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” he said. “As such I am bound to disappoint some if not all of them.”

But one of the most curious things about those who support him most is not their disappointments – given their high hopes for him, that’s to be expected – but their enduring devotion in the face of those disappointments. It’s as though each single disillusionment is consumed as its own discrete letdown. String them together and you have not a narrative of failing to deliver on promises, but a litany of isolated, separate chapters – each with its own caveats, exceptions and explanations.

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Exposing Netanyahu

Paul Pillar writes:

Probably the most significant take-away from the past few days of U.S.-Israeli dialog is to shed light on the true intentions of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding peace with the Palestinians. Although Netanyahu finally allowed the phrase “Palestinian state” to pass his lips for the first time almost two years ago, this past week in Washington provided further confirmation of what had been apparent all along: that whatever conception Netanyahu may have of such a “state,” it is not a formula having any chance of becoming the basis for—to use Netanyahu’s own words from his joint appearance with President Obama on Friday—“a peace that will be genuine, that will hold, that will endure,” or probably even what most of the rest of the world would consider a state. Netanyahu is smart enough to realize this, which is to say he is content to let the status quo endure indefinitely. Israel will maintain that status quo through brute force—military force within the territories, and political force in Washington.

The drop-the-veil moment during this past week was the importunate lobbying by Netanyahu’s government before President Obama delivered his Middle East speech on Thursday at the State Department (and doesn’t that say something right there—where else would one see a foreign government get in the last lobbying licks on a president’s speech, even at the expense of delaying the speech?) to omit any mention of the 1967 borders as the basis for negotiating land swaps and an eventual territorial settlement. The president mentioned that anyway, and in the joint appearance on Friday Netanyahu said nothing about land swaps, instead denouncing the 1967 borders as not being a suitable basis for anything. As Mr. Obama correctly noted in his address to AIPAC on Sunday, there was nothing new in his mention of 1967-borders-with-swaps. It has long been recognized as the only formula that has any hope of being the basis for a successful negotiation. It has been the basis for several official proposals, including one by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. It also has been at the center of several unofficial proposals, including ones from people whose concern for Israel cannot be doubted (such as a plan offered by David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy).

So for Netanyahu, not only is the land allotted to the Jewish state in the UN partition plan of the 1940s not enough, and not only is the larger territory that became the State of Israel with what we call the 1967 borders not enough. Even with land swaps that would extend Israel farther into the West Bank and include the large majority of the settlements Israel has constructed on land seized in the 1967 war, that would still not be enough for him. How much would be enough? One can speculate on what crumbs of land would be left to the Palestinians, but speculation is not required to have an idea based on Netanyahu’s own statements of what such a “state” would entail: Israeli control of the airspace, no military of its own, and, as the prime minister mentioned on Friday, a “long-term” Israeli military presence along the Jordan River. It sounds like a bantustan that would make Bophuthatswana look like a paragon of sovereignty. But trying to envision the details of such an entity is pointless because it is a non-starter very likely intended to be rejected.

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Obama makes peace with AIPAC

If there’s one way of registering that President Obama could be saying something of significance while he’s addressing AIPAC, it’s during those passages when he gets no applause.

This morning he got plenty of applause when he assured the pro-Israel lobby that a negotiated border between Israel and a Palestinian state will not end up being the 1967 border.

But when he outlined the degree to which the regional and wider international environment has changed and implicitly acknowledged that Israel and the US are out of step with these changes, the audience was silent.

[A] new generation of Arabs is reshaping the region. A just and lasting peace can no longer be forged with one or two Arab leaders. Going forward, millions of Arab citizens have to see that peace is possible for that peace to be sustained.

And just as the context has changed in the Middle East, so too has it been changing in the international community over the last several years. There’s a reason why the Palestinians are pursuing their interests at the United Nations. They recognize that there is an impatience with the peace process, or the absence of one, not just in the Arab World — in Latin America, in Asia, and in Europe. And that impatience is growing, and it’s already manifesting itself in capitals around the world.

Before Obama arrived at the Washington DC convention center where AIPAC is assembled, AIPAC supporters gathered outside were heard yelling through a bullhorn: “Kill Obama.” I’ve seen no reports of anyone getting arrested for trying to incite the assassination of the president.

Ron Kampeas summed up the mood in this way: “When Obama is in the room, AIPAC is supportive. When he is out of the room, skeptical.”

Earlier, Reuters reported:

Some prominent Jewish Americans are rethinking their support for President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election bid after he effectively called on Israel to give back territory it has occupied since 1967 to Palestinians.

The backlash after Obama’s keynote speech on the Middle East has Democratic Party operatives scrambling to mollify the Jewish community as the president prepares to seek a second term in the White House.

Obama on Thursday called for any new Palestinian state to respect the borders as they were in 1967, prompting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to tell him bluntly that his vision of how to achieve Middle East peace was unrealistic.

“He has in effect sought to reduce Israel’s negotiation power and I condemn him for that,” former New York Mayor Ed Koch told Reuters.

Koch said he might not campaign or vote for Obama if Republicans nominate a pro-Israel candidate who offers an alternative to recent austere budgetary measures backed by Republicans in Congress.

Koch donated $2,300 to Obama’s campaign in 2008, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

“I believed that then-Senator Obama would be as good as John McCain based on his statements at the time and based on his support of Israel. It turns out I was wrong,” he said.

Despite the stormy reaction to Obama’s remarks, some commentators noted talk of the 1967 borders was nothing new.

“This has been the basic idea for at least 12 years. This is what Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat were talking about at Camp David, and later, at Taba,” Jeffrey Goldberg wrote on The Atlantic website.

“This is what George W. Bush was talking about with Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. So what’s the huge deal here?”

Exit polls from the 2008 election showed 78 percent of Jewish voters chose Obama over his Republican rival Senator McCain.

“I have spoken to a lot of people in the last couple of days — former supporters — who are very upset and feel alienated,” billionaire real estate developer and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman said.

“He’ll get less political support, fewer activists for his campaign, and I am sure that will extend to financial support as well.”

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Obama: Doomed to disappoint

John J Mearsheimer writes:

Barack Obama gave a major speech on the Middle East on Thursday, May 19, and it is clear from the subsequent commentary that he impressed few people. The main reason for this is that he did not say much new or indicate that there would be any serious changes in US policy in the region. It was essentially more of the same with some tweaking here and there. Nevertheless, he did manage to anger some people. For example, Israel’s hard-line supporters were outraged that he said: “Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.” For them, the 1967 borders are “Auschwitz borders” and thus can never serve as a basis for negotiations.

Many Palestinians, on the other hand, did not like Obama’s assertion that it made little sense for them to go to the UN General Assembly this September and win recognition for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders. Surely they also noticed that shortly after saying “every state has the right to self-defence, and Israel must be able to defend itself,” the president said that the Palestinians would have to be content with “a sovereign non-militarised state,” which means that they would not be able to defend themselves against Israel – or any other state for that matter. Hypocrisy appears to be wired into the DNA of US foreign policy makers.

Obama’s failure to impress and move US Middle East policy in new directions raises the intriguing question: Did he blow an opportunity to give a truly important speech at what appears to be a plastic moment in history? I think not. The sad fact is that Obama has remarkably little manoeuvre room on the foreign policy front. The most important item on his agenda is settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and there he knows what has to be done: Push both sides toward a two-state solution, which is the best outcome for all the parties, including the United States. Indeed, he has been trying to do just that since he took office in January 2009. But the remarkably powerful Israel lobby makes it virtually impossible for him to put meaningful pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is committed to creating a Greater Israel in which the Palestinians are restricted to a handful of disconnected and impoverished enclaves. And Obama is certainly not going to buck the lobby – with the 2012 presidential election looming larger every day.

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Our revolt is not Obama’s

Ahdaf Soueif writes:

This wasn’t slipping poison into the honey; it was smearing chemical sweeteners on to toxic pellets. Barack Obama listed what he sees as his country’s “core interests” in my country Egypt and my region; his country’s “core principles” governing how it will act towards us, and his policies to promote US interests within the frame of US principles. Let’s translate the US president’s description of his “core interests in the region” into effects on the ground:

“Countering terrorism” has implicated (at least) Egypt, Syria and Jordan in the US’s extraordinary rendition programme, turning our governments into torturers for hire and consolidating a culture of security services supremacy and brutality that is killing Syrian protesters today and manifests itself in Egypt as a serious counter-revolution.

“Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons” highlights consistent US double standards as Arab nuclear scientists are murdered, the US threatens Iran, and Israel happily develops its illicit arsenal.

“Securing the free flow of commerce” has meant shoving crony capitalism down our throats, bribing governments to sell our national assets and blackmailing us into partnerships bad for us.

“Supporting Israel” has led to land, resources and hope being stolen from Palestinians while Egypt becomes their jailer and dishonest broker, losing its credibility and self-respect.

Obama has all the information above; he knows that Hosni Mubarak’s dedication to delivering US “core interests” is why the Egyptian millions demanded his departure, why Tahrir proclaimed him an “agent of America and Israel”, and why he is now under arrest.

The blame is not all with America. We had a regime that was susceptible, that became actively complicit; assiduously finding ways to serve US and Israeli interests – and ruin us. But: we got rid of it. Peaceably, with grace and within the law. We Got Rid of It.

So when Obama says, “We will continue to do” the things described above, it’s a challenge. When he adds, “with the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they are essential to them” – it’s obfuscation and an insult to every citizen across the world – including Americans – who followed our revolutions with empathy and with hope.

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The borders of Auschwitz

David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, had he not died before 1967, would surely have been disappointed to hear it said that he and fellow Zionists who fought to create a Jewish state had such meager success that in its first two decades of existence, Israel was barely an improvement on Auschwitz.

It’s hard to know who should be more offended by that assessment: the victims of the Holocaust or Israel’s founders?

In his response to President Obama’s suggestion that Israel should — with mutually agreed land swaps with Palestinians — retreat to its 1967 borders, Benjamin Netanyahu says that such a move would place Israel behind “indefensible” borders.

Netanyahu is alluding to a phrase now employed by many on the right that he himself once invoked: “the borders of Auschwitz.”

In the New York Times, Robert Mackey and Elizabeth Harris explain:

That resonant phrase, which suggests that Israelis would face genocide should they withdraw fully from the land they have occupied since the end of the 1967 war, is based on a mangled version of a remark made by the Israeli diplomat Abba Eban in 1969. According to Haaretz, Mr. Eban told the German newsweekly Der Spiegel in that year: “We have openly said that the map will never again be the same as on June 4, 1967. For us, this is a matter of security and of principles. The June map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.”

Israeli leaders have frequently used some version of this phrase to invoke the existential dread of the Holocaust when pressed to withdraw from the occupied territories as part of a peace agreement.

In 2002, Ariel Sharon told William Safire that a proposed Saudi peace plan was unacceptable because, “Israel cannot return to the ‘67 borders. Abba Eban long ago called them ‘Auschwitz borders’; Israel would not be able to exist.”

A decade earlier, when another Israeli leader, Yitzhak Shamir, expressed his outrage when the administration of President George H. W. Bush called for a freeze on Jewish settlements in the occupied territories — in exchange for $10 billion in American loan guarantees — The Times reported that a senior official in the prime minister’s office, a young Benjamin Netanyahu, complained that Israel was being asked to accept, “the borders of Auschwitz.”

Writing about the use and abuse of this phrase in 2007, the Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston observed that the right-wing Israeli politicians who had frequently invoked Mr. Eban to support their refusal to cede territory were less likely to mention another of his famous maxims: “Israel’s birth is intrinsically and intimately linked with the idea of sharing territory and sovereignty.”

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Obama granted Netanayhu a major diplomatic victory

Aluf Benn writes:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can feel satisfied while flying to Washington Thursday night. U.S. President Barack Obama has granted Netanyahu a major diplomatic victory.

In return for his call for the establishment of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders with agreed land swaps, without defining the size of these lands, Obama accepted Netanyahu’s demands for strict security arrangements and a gradual, continuous withdrawal from the West Bank.

He suggested beginning negotiations on borders and security arrangements, and delaying discussions on the core issues such as Jerusalem and refugees.

More importantly, Obama scornfully rejected the Palestinian initiative to attain recognition at the United Nations and to isolate Israel, demanded the Palestinians return to negotiations, and called on Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist. These points came straight out of the policy pages of the Prime Minister’s Bureau in Jerusalem. Netanyahu could not have asked for more: Obama outright rejects Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ recognition campaign, as well as the Palestinian reconciliation agreement.

It seems that the new Fatah-Hamas unity has saved Netanyahu from a much more aggressive and binding speech on the part of Obama.

Obama could have also delivered his Mideast speech during the impending AIPAC conference, which he will attend this coming Sunday.

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Every state has the right to self-defense — except a Palestinian state

After returning to the White House having delivered his much anticipated Middle East speech, I imagine President Obama now eagerly awaits news on how quickly and handsomely he will be rewarded by nervous campaign donors who were still unsure about his loyalty to Israel. The cash will no doubt now start rolling in.

As for security, every state has the right to self-defense, and Israel must be able to defend itself – by itself – against any threat. Provisions must also be robust enough to prevent a resurgence of terrorism; to stop the infiltration of weapons; and to provide effective border security. The full and phased withdrawal of Israeli military forces should be coordinated with the assumption of Palestinian security responsibility in a sovereign, non-militarized state.

Every state has the right to self-defense, unless it’s a Palestinian state. In a Palestinian state the primary responsibility of its security forces will be to protect Israel.

From Israel, Larry Derfner comments:

In his speech on the Middle East, Obama gave the Palestinians nothing and gave Israel a lot, which means he strengthened the status quo, which Israel is perfectly happy with and only the Palestinians want to change. By saying the Israeli-Palestinian border should be based on the ’67 line, he just repeated what Clinton said publicly about a year ago (and what her husband said in the White House a decade ago). What was new, or at least newer, was his endorsement of Netanyahu’s call for a “non-militarized” Palestine – which is a contradiction to a sovereign Palestine, something Obama claimed also to support. And by mentioning the need to stop the smuggling of weapons into Palestine, he might have been giving a nod to Netanyahu’s demand to keep the Israeli army on the Jordan Valley. Also, he repeated his opposition to the Palestinians’ plan to seek recognition from the UN in September. In all, a very, very good day for the occupation. But I think Obama just lost the Palestinians. Abbas cannot go along with this prescription, none of them can. They have to go to the UN, they have to go ahead with the popular resistance, to go out into the street en masse – to the settlements, to the army outposts, to the fence, and hope for the Tahrir effect – to win the world to their side – and for this, they must remain non-violent – and shame Israel in the eyes of the world and force Obama and the other timid Western leaders to force Israel to end the occupation. There’s just no other way. I’d thought that maybe after killing Bin Laden, Obama would have the political capital to pressure Israel. Whether he has it or not, he’s too timid, or too election-minded, to use it. To the cause of peace and justice in Israel and Palestine, he just became a write-off.

Who could have predicted that after two years, Obama’s greatest achievement is that he increasingly makes George Bush look like a man of substance.

To my ear, the best worst paragraph in the speech was this:

That is the choice that must be made – not simply in this [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, but across the entire region – a choice between hate and hope; between the shackles of the past, and the promise of the future. It’s a choice that must be made by leaders and by people, and it’s a choice that will define the future of a region that served as the cradle of civilization and a crucible of strife.

At least when Dubya delivered a vacuous statement like this, he’d make it a bit more entertaining by mangling a few words or making an inappropriate facial expression.

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Follow the money

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Jewish donors and fund-raisers are warning the Obama re-election campaign that the president is at risk of losing financial support because of concerns about his handling of Israel.

The complaints began early in President Barack Obama’s term, centered on a perception that Mr. Obama has been too tough on Israel.

Some Jewish donors say Mr. Obama has pushed Israeli leaders too hard to halt construction of housing settlements in disputed territory, a longstanding element of U.S. policy. Some also worry that Mr. Obama is putting more pressure on the Israelis than the Palestinians to enter peace negotiations, and say they are disappointed Mr. Obama has not visited Israel yet.

One top Democratic fund-raiser, Miami developer Michael Adler, said he urged Obama campaign manager Jim Messina to be “extremely proactive” in countering the perception in the Jewish community that Mr. Obama is too critical of Israel.

He said his conversations with Mr. Messina were aimed at addressing the problems up front. “This was going around finding out what our weaknesses are so we can run the best campaign,” said Mr. Adler, who hosted a fund-raiser at his home for Mr. Obama earlier this year.

“Good friends tell you how you can improve. They don’t tell you ‘everything’s great’ and then you find out nobody buys the food in your restaurants,” he said.

It is difficult to assess how widespread the complaints are. Many Jews support Mr. Obama’s approach to the Middle East, and his domestic agenda. But Jewish fund-raisers for Mr. Obama say they regularly hear discontent among some supporters.

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Assassination nation: Are there any limits on President Obama’s license to kill?

James Bovard writes:

How much evidence should the US government be obliged to show before it kills an American citizen?

None, according to the Obama administration.

And how much evidence should the government be obliged to possess of an American’s wrongdoing before officially targeting them for killing?

That’s a secret, according to the Obama team.

As part of its war against violent extremism, the Obama administration now claims a right to kill Americans without a trial, without notice, and without any chance for targets to legally object. On May 6, the US government launched a drone attack to try to kill a US citizen in Yemen. The Obama administration alleges that Anwar al-Awlaki, an American born Muslim cleric, helped spark killings at Fort Hood, Texas, and an attempt to blow up a jetliner in 2009. Mr. Awlaki might be a four-star bad guy, but government press releases and background briefings have not previously been sufficient to justify capital punishment. The drone attack failed to terminate Awlaki, though two other people were killed.

The US government has admitted that it has added the names of other Americans to a list for targeted killing. The American Civil Liberties Union sued last year to compel the government “to disclose the legal standard it uses to place US citizens on government kill lists,” but was thwarted when the Obama administration claimed the entire program was a “state secret.” Last December, federal Judge John Bates dismissed the ACLU’s lawsuit because “there are circumstances in which the Executive’s unilateral decision to kill a US citizen overseas” is “judicially unreviewable.”

Assuming that Obama doesn’t lose his appetite for extrajudicial killing, it seems likely that missiles fired from drones will remain his weapon of choice. Old-fashioned death squads leave open the inconvenient possibility that the assassination target might attempt to surrender.

Did Osama bin Laden have his empty hands held high just before he was shot in the head? We can only be sure that any awkward record of such a fact would remain sealed in a vault for many decades.

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Anticipation builds (in Washington) for Obama’s big Mideast speech

Osama bin Laden might be dead, but al Qaeda still operates a nimble media outfit.

Just as the US media drone anticipating President Obama’s speech later this morning started to grow tiresome, Obama’s words got preempted by Osama’s.

I can’t help wondering what his assassination would have looked like if it had occurred immediately after he expressed support for the Arab Awakening.

In an audio message recorded shortly before his death, Reuters reports:

Bin Laden praised the Egyptian revolution and urged Arab protesters to maintain their momentum, adding: “I believe that the winds of change will envelope the entire Muslim world.”

“This revolution was not for food and clothing. Rather, it was a revolution of glory and pride, a revolution of sacrifice and giving. It has lit the Nile’s cities and its villages from its lower reaches to the top,” he said.

“To those free rebels in all the countries — retain the initiative and be careful of dialogue. No meeting mid-way between the people of truth and those of deviation.”

Bin Laden made no specific reference to Libya, Syria, Bahrain and Yemen, where pro-democracy protesters have had less success than in Egypt and Tunisia, but said Israel, reviled by many ordinary Arabs, was worried by the unrest.

Bin Laden called on young Arabs to consult “those of experience and honesty” and to set up a framework that would allow them to “follow up events and works in parallel… to save the people that are struggling to bring down their tyrants.”

How significant is Osama’s endorsement of the uprisings? It probably won’t have much influence on the average demonstrator in Syria, Bahrain, Libya, Egypt, or Yemen. But it might result in a few would-be jihadists joining the political mainstream.

Meanwhile, how much influence is Obama likely to have two years after his previous and much-hyped Cairo speech turned out to be hollow rhetoric?

McClatchy’s Hannah Allam just took the pulse of the Arab street:

Most common responses when I asked random Egyptians about watching Obama’s #MEspeech: He’s speaking? When? About what?

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