I intended this to be a post about Abbas’s statehood bid, the confusion surrounding it, how Palestinians have largely been left in the dark about it, the implications, the strategy, indeed the futility and stupidity, but how could anyone listen to what Obama had to say and not want to respond? He gave his much anticipated speech to the United Nation’s General Assembly Friday, in which he lambasted the forthcoming bid for Palestinian Statehood by the Palestinian Authority. And short of standing up on the podium and waving the Israeli flag and singing Hatkivah and calling for the transfer of the Palestinians, he did everything the pro-Zionist right could have hoped for.
“Quite an achievement for Obama to take up a position on the spectrum to the right of Ariel Sharon’s man Olmert” tweeted Ali Abunimah.
“Introducing President Barak Netanyau” joked Akiva Eldar.
Indeed, it was an I love Israel fest. And listening to the speech, you would have thought it was Israel who was under occupation (but that word was never mentioned; neither, for that matter, were settlements, which encroach ever deeper into Palestinians lands as we speak).
As far as Obama was concerned, Israel is our bestest fwend in the whole wide world and nothing, I mean nothing, is going to change that (in case we had any doubts). Heck, Israel could have been stashing a secret stockpile of nuclear weapons (their supposed vulnerability notwithstanding), could have been responsible for the largest rate of political incarceration in the world, for attacking its neighbors multiple times (that they are the ones “dedicated to Israel’s destruction” is another story) for violently colonizing and subjecting millions of people to apartheid policies for decades, for besieging and bombing a defenseless population and depriving them of their basic rights… Oh wait. They are responsible for all these things. Sometimes I wonder if Israel just decided to obliterate us all at once and spare us the slow, painful death of the past few decades if it would make any difference to the United States. But then we would only be blamed for forcing them to this point, for not cooperating, for not being civil when Jim Crow came to visit. One thing’s for sure, even if Israelis themselves eventually protested, American leadership will still be singing the praises of the racist friends that rule over them.