Can Obama Heal the Divisions Created By Eight Years of Bush?

Here is another recent article by Fisk on Obama and his views on the Middle East.

Ed Corrigan

Americans could discuss and speak frankly about blacks, he said, but not about Israel. And so it proved to be."

Can Obama Heal the Divisions Created By Eight Years of Bush?

by Robert FiskThe late Palestinian scholar Edward Said - to whom Barack Obama was wont to listen - said there was only one taboo left in the United States. Americans could discuss and speak frankly about blacks, he said, but not about Israel. And so it proved to be. The Americans elected a black president on Tuesday - but couldn't talk about Israel. Nor could Obama.

Nor was this surprising. His victory speech was more moving to hear than it was to read later, when the omissions were more obvious. Justice - that commodity most sought by Arabs - was absent. The Wall was mentioned - but it turned out Obama was talking about the Berlin Wall, not the fence which dare not speak its name. And when he referred to "those who would tear the world down" one wondered about the identity of these titanic iconoclasts.

Who could they be? George Bush's "men of evil"? Or the Palestinians who would like to tear down the rather odd construction (let us call it that) which snakes for 104 miles around East Jerusalem and which will eventually run for 437 miles?

The Arabs, it should be added, rather like Obama. Not because they believe he was a Muslim. Not because he is black. But because he grew up poor, and most Arabs also grow up poor. But that is like saying - as the Arabs did eight years ago - that George Bush might be a good US president because he "knew" about the Arabs and oil. Indeed, he did.

But it was so easy in the early hours of Wednesday morning to forget that this same Barack Obama, the eloquent, brave man who at last proved America's domestic political maturity, was the same Barack Obama who blamed the Lebanese Hezbollah for the 2006 war in Lebanon (total dead, well over 1,000 civilians, almost all of them Lebanese) and who helped to put the Hezbollah on Washington's "terror" list; and who encouraged the US Senate to put Iran under sanctions last year; and who said - at an infamous AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) lobby group dinner - that Jerusalem should be Israel's "undivided capital".

If it was comforting to find Obama distancing himself from Bush's Mesopotamian mendacity, the hell-disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan got only a passing note of sympathy; for the US troops who fought in the "deserts" to protect their countrymen at home, rather than for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had died most terribly because of the lies and aggression of the man who will keep Obama's job until 20 January.

And much can happen in three months. Israel could strike Iran. Or America could strike Iran. Or al-Qa'ida could strike America. Or Osama could strike Obama. Or someone else could strike Obama. Or, at the mere hint of a little balance and fairmindedness in the Arab- Israeli conflict, there are those who will not hesitate to revisit the fables; that Obama is a Muslim, that he "consorted" with the friends of "terrorists" when he mixed with folk such as Rashid Khalidi, the scholarly Palestinian who stepped into Edward Said's shoes at Columbia, that he might not be quite as pro-Israeli as he claimed to the AIPAC guys and girls. Given the nature of American politics, this might be a political risk more lethal than death.