Obama and Arab-Israeli diplomacy

There has been a lot of speculation in Washington these past weeks about the content of the Arab-Israeli stance we might expect to see from the Obama administration. I have followed this speculation as closely as just about everyone, and have the following observations to make:
1. It is still far too early to make any concrete predictions at all. All we know so far is the content of the top-level appointments he announced on December 1, to his foreign affairs and national security team, and the prominent mention he made in that announcement of the need to find “a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
2. What we still do not, very significantly, know is how exactly the responsibilities will be divided between Hillary Clinton at State, and Gen. Jim Jones as NSC adviser. All we know is that Hillary asked for, and got, an assurance that she would have direct access to the Prez whenever she needs it. Which is not at all the same as saying that she will over-rule Jones, who will have direct access to the Prez as a matter of course and who is expected to play a strong role as NSC adviser.
3. One of my working assumptions is that Hillary might be expected to be more accommodationist than Jones to whatever government is in power in Israel, and more reserved than him about articulating the United States’ own strong interest in the conclusion of a final, conflict-ending, and claims-ending peace in the region. I might be wrong. But she has been a close and good friend of AIPAC for a long time now. Jones, meanwhile, gained important, firsthand experience into the (previously often dysfunctional) dynamics of the US-Israel-Palestine triangle during his work on revamping the PA’s security apparatus in Jenin. He is a high-level military man with considerable leadership experience, not someone whom Hillary can easily roll right over. (Also, his military experience and stature will be an important asset to Obama as Obama tries to figure out how to deal with the Israelis.)
4. Dennis Ross has worked hard to get himself “mentioned” as possible Arab-Israeli diplomacy czar in many publications in the US, Israel, and elsewhere (including, today, here.) Dennis has been a staunch Clinton-ite ever since he opportunistically jumped ship straight from George Bush I’s failed re-election campaign in ’92 to the Clinton camp. He did a workman-like job on Israeli-Arab diplomacy so long as he was closely supervised by Sec. of State Jim Baker, but once he rose higher on the feeding chain his own preferences were always for (a) lengthy delay in the conclusion of a final peace agreement– argued for in the name of “ripeness theory” and the need for very lengthy “confidence building” before the final negotiations even start; and (b) trying to split the Arab parties off from each other and play each off against the others in a classic “divide and rule” way.
5. However, despite all this “mentioning” and other forms of speculation, we still really do not know anything about how Obama intends to pursue his stated goal of a speedy move toward a final Israel-Palestine peace. And I suspect much of that “mentioning” might backfire.
6. We will not know the content of the policy until we hear additional substantive statements from the President-elect and/or see the next echelon down of Middle-East-relevant appointments being announced, with the lines of their responsibility also clearly established.
7. Given the urgency with which Obama spoke about the need for a final Israel-Palestine peace he may well have hoped to have more pieces of that policy (as in #6 above) in place by now. But the economic crisis has been overwhelming everything else on his agenda in the past couple of weeks. We still have 37 days to go before the inauguration. I am sure we will learn more before then.

Obama on Iraq: before and after

After a spirited exchange with Alex regarding what Barack Obama’s plans might be for Iraq, I thought it would be informative to look at Obama’s remarks before and after the election.
March 19, 2008
I will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. We can responsibly remove 1 to 2 combat brigades each month. If we start with the number of brigades we have in Iraq today, we can remove all of them [in] 16 months. After this redeployment, we will leave enough troops in Iraq to guard our embassy and diplomats, and a counter-terrorism force to strike al Qaeda if it forms a base that the Iraqis cannot destroy.
December 7, 2008 (Meet the Press)
We are going to maintain a large enough force in the region to assure that our civilian troops–or our, our, our civilian personnel and our, our embassies are protected, to make sure that we can ferret out any remaining terrorist activity in the region, in cooperation with the Iraqi government, that we are providing training and logistical support, maintaining the integrity of Iraq as necessary. And, you know, I–one of the things that I’ll be doing is evaluating what kind of number’s required to meet those very limited goals.

Welcome new thinking on the Palestine Question

In Washington today former deputy speaker of Israel’s Knesset Naomi
Chazan had some great advice for President-elect
Obama. Noting that Israel’s election comes just 20 days after Obama’s
inauguration, she said Obama should wait 20 days before announcing the
US’s new policy on the Arab-Israeli peace– “but he shouldn’t wait any
longer than 21 days.”

The US might, she said, present its own peace plan. (She didn’t spell out whether Obama should do that right then, or a little later.)

Chazan– who is one of the smartest and most well-grounded people I
know, of any nationality or gender– also argued
convincingly that the whole process that goes back to Oslo and running
right through Annapolis “has dead-ended.” She said the whole way the
“peace process” has been framed and organized since Oslo needs to be
reframed, and gave some excellent suggestions on how to do this.

She was speaking along with Daniel Levy at the New America Foundation,
at an event co-hosted by the strongly pro-peace New Israel Fund, of
whose board she is president.

Chazan  provided these three examples of the kind of reframing
she envisaged:

  1. “We need to recognize
    the asymmetry there is both on the ground and at the negotiating table,
    between the Israelis and Palestinians, and find ways to rebalance that.
    So far, since Oslo, the negotiations have all tended to create a false
    idea that there is symmetry between them. There isn’t.” Later,
    Levy  amplified that point, saying that just leaving the two
    sides in a room together to deal with everything through bilateral
    negotiations wouldn’t work. Chazan agreed. Both of them said the US
    needs to play a much more activist role in the negotiations than it did
    in the whole “process” from Oslo through Annapolis.
  2. “We need to go back to looking at the root causes of the
    conflict. There’s always been this idea that doing this would be
    unhelpful to the negotiations, but actually there are ways it could be
    helpful.” Later, in response to a question about the Palestinian
    refugee issue, she spelled out that rather than dealing with it just in
    a distant and sort of technical way, if the Israeli government would
    agree to make some kind of public acknowledgment that Israel’s actions
    had “helped to create” the problem and wanted to join with others in
    finding a solution, that was the kind of action that could help move
    the whole process forward.
  3. “We could also think of trying to separate the issues of
    ending the occupation and dismantling the settlements.” In the
    discussion period she noted that the fact that settlement dismantlement
    had always, in the Oslo-to-Annapolis process, been an explicit item on
    the agenda gave the settlers and their supporters a big cause to
    mobilize around and, in effect, gave them a veto over the whole
    negotiation. “But how about if we didn’t say anything explicit at all
    about the settlements or the settlers but just reached an agreement by
    which Israel would withdraw completely to the Green Line or a line near
    it with negotiated changes, handing the area over in the first instance
    to an international or NATO force, perhaps without doing anything
    explicit to dismantle the settlements? What would the settlers do then?
    They lose their veto.”

Chazan’s visit to Washington is timely indeed. As I noted here
on Monday, when Obama announced his foreign policy team in Chicago
earlier that day, he also made prominent mention of the need to work
rapidly “a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”

Continue reading “Welcome new thinking on the Palestine Question”

Obama’s foreign affairs team and Arab-Israel diplomacy

His foreign affairs team comes, now, as no surprise. But what was welcome in his speech in Chicago today was the prominent mention he made of the need to find “a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
That’s especially welcome, coming a few days after the veteran Clinton-era peace processor Aaron Miller came out swinging with a public argument that an Israeli-Palestinian peace is just too difficult, so Obama shouldn’t even make any effort at reaching it but should focus on brokering a Syria-Israel peace instead.
Let’s hope wiser heads prevail! Significant though a Syria-Israel peace would be, by far the greater worldwide symbolism– and by far the greater actual, continuing human suffering— attaches to the horrible structural and physical violence of the Palestine-Israel conflict.
Plus, once there’s a final peace between Israel and Palestine, an Israel-Syria deal can fall into place extremely easily. (Its parameters have long been well known.)
The reverse is decidedly not the case.
So if a choice has to be made between the two tracks, Obama should plump for the Palestine track as the highest priority.
But here’s an important idea: Why should he feel he needs to make some kind of a contrived “choice” between the two tracks, anyway?
Why not aim at a speedy, grand settlement of all the outstanding portions of the Arab-Israeli dispute, all at once?
This is really not such a radical idea. In the great peace settlements of earlier eras– 1815, 1919, 1945, etc– huge numbers of outstanding disputes, some of them of very lengthy duration, were all resolved together, as a kind of a “package deal.”
Compared with those earlier, continent- or globe-girdling grand settlements, resolving Israel’s outstanding conflicts with Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon “all in one fell swoop” looks very do-able indeed, almost picayune. And right now, with the Saudi peace plan of 2002, there’s a great vehicle for getting into that comprehensive negotiation.
President Obama could also build on the precedent of the 1991, Bush-I-era Madrid peace conference, which also aimed at a comprehensive settlement of all the outstanding tracks of the Israeli-Arab dispute.
One big advantage of this approach, compared with trying endlessly– yet again!– to take partial or incremental steps along each of the tracks separately is that the “pain” of the settlement, in terms of the concessions that all the parties will need to make from their long-held political positions, will be a one-off thing, rather than a scary and continuing “death from a hundred cuts.” Meanwhile, the “gain” of the settlement, in terms of the huge relief the citizens of all these countries will win from the burdens of war, occupation, and international estrangement, will be much more definitive and palpable than any “gain” they could reasonably expect from partial settlements.
Ending the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety will also breathe huge new life into the relationships Israel has with Egypt and Jordan, which remain very strained even though both those countries have long had formal peace treaties with Israel.
Ending the Arab-Israeli conflict in its entirety on terms that are fair and enshrine the key principles of human equality, international legitimacy, and a commitment to setting aside all forms of violence will allow Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Israelis, and all the other peoples of the Middle East to breath a huge sigh of relief… to build new kinds of relations with other… and to move into a much more hopeful future.
So that’s why I’m glad Barack Obama put such an emphasis on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s not that the Israel-Syria track is insignificant. It’s not. But it’s a dangerous illusion to think that brokering peace on that track could be any kind of a substitute for doing the hard diplomatic work that’s so urgently needed on the Palestine track.
Actually, it’s an even more dangerous illusion to believe that any “peace broker”– whether it continues to be overwhelmingly the US or shifts to being a more genuinely international effort– has to make a “choice” between pushing on the Palestine track or the Syria track.
Go for the whole grand Arab-Israeli settlement, Obama! That is the way to truly transform the Middle East– as well as our country’s relationship with the whole of the rest of the world.

Mr. Obama, tear down this war!

Mr. Obama, tear down this war! You have promised change and the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) is the worst legacy of the Bush administration. You should denounce it.
Unfortunately, unlike other undeclared pseudo-wars like the Cold War, the war on poverty and the war on drugs, this “war” includes real violence on real people.
Using the “GWOT” as justification, the worst crimes in US history have been committed. These include war against nations which never threatened the US, imprisonment and torture of not only foreigners in large numbers but also US citizens (e.g. Jose Padilla) and unconstitutional domestic surveillance. If these crimes are to stop then their justification must be removed.
There ought to be no problem terminating the “GWOT.” A strategy based on military force has been thoroughly discredited, and it wasn’t even liked by the people who initiated it, but they continued to use it because it was useful against US citizens, to keep them frightened and unified in favor of the government which was busy committing aforesaid crimes.

Continue reading “Mr. Obama, tear down this war!”

Prunier on Laurent Nkunda and the DRC crisis

The veteran French expert on central Africa Gerard Prunier has an excellent piece on Open Democracy today that pulls together a lot of the essential political background to the tragically re-ignited fighting in eastern D.R. Congo.
Prunier notes in particular the extremely belligerent and damaging role the RPF government in Rwanda has played in DRC for many years, including the on-again-off-again support it has given to the leader of the current big armed rebellion in eastern DRC, Gen. Laurent Nkunda.
At the end of his article, Prunier writes:

    Why do we see such zigzagging on Nkunda’s part? Mostly because there is not a single coherent policy in Kigali to either support or disown him. It depends on the fluctuation of the political atmosphere there… Since the well-organised electoral “victories” of the RPF [in Rwanda]… there is no Hutu opposition worth the name. Just mentioning such a term is labeled “divisionism” and can get you twenty years in jail. So the political game is played among Tutsi. And the Tutsi do not agree on how to deal with the Congo in general and with Laurent Nkunda in particular.
    Some, like President Kagame himself, want to put the past behind them, develop Rwanda along extremely modernistic lines and turn the country into the Singapore of Africa. But others do not believe in such a possibility and still see the Congo as a mineral mother-lode waiting to be exploited; they include some of Kagame’s closest associates such as the semi-exiled ambassador Kayumba Nyamwasa and army chief-of-staff James Kabarebe…
    The outcome of the United States presidential election on 4 November 2008 is an encouragement for the latter group. After all, it was the Africanists around Bill Clinton (who are now Barack Obama’s men and women) who supported the Kigali invasion of the DR Congo while it was Republican secretary of state Colin Powell who brought it to a halt in 2001. Have the Democrats changed their views on the region or do they still believe in the fiction that Rwanda only intervenes in the Congo in order to keep the ugly génocidaires at bay? In any case the situation in the DRC is now more serious than it has been at any point since the signature of the 2002 peace agreement.
    But does it actually mean the situation has returned to that of 1998, and the DR Congo is about to explode into another civil war? Probably not. Why? Because there are several fundamental differences:
    * Rwanda, even if it is involved, is involved at a marginal and contradictory level .
    * in 1998, pro-Kigali elements controlled large segments of the Forces Armées Congolaises (FAC), the then Congolese national army. The initial onslaught was carried out through an internal rebellion of the armed forces. Not so today. Nkunda controls only an army of unofficial militiamen
    * in 1998 the regime of Laurent-Désiré Kabila was very weak, hardly legitimate and did not have any serious international support. Today his son Joseph Kabila is strongly supported by the internal community after overseeing a flawed but clearly democratic election
    * the Congolese economy was at the time in complete disarray while today it is only in poor shape, with possibilities of picking up
    * President Kagame could count on the almost unlimited sympathy of the world which felt guilty for its neglect during the genocide. Not so today. His moral credibility has been seriously damaged by the horrors his troops committed in the DR Congo during 1998-2002 and his political standing is increasingly being questioned, both by legal action going back to the genocide period (reflected in the French indictment and Frankfurt arrest) and by his electoral “triumphs” (which are a throwback to the worst days of fake African political unanimity)
    * the diplomatic context, reflected in the current visit to the region of the United Nations envoy (and Nigeria’s former president) Olusegun Obasanjo, is more favourable to negotiation
    * In 1998 there was no United Nations peacekeeping force in eastern DR Congo. If the international community decides to straighten out its act, Monuc could make the difference.

I am glad to see that even such a seasoned old pro as Prunier thinks there is some hope that MONUC might make a real difference to the situation in Congo. I certainly hope so. But I largely share the misgivings he expresses about the pro-RPF sympathies of those who seem likely to emerge as important figures in the next US administration.
Another very significant aspect of the present fighting in DRC is the fact that– as I had forgotten, but Prunier reminded me– Laurent Nkunda is an indicted war criminal, having been indicted by the DRC government for a 2002 incident in Kisangani in which more than 160 persons were summarily executed. (Prunier wrote, mistakenly, that Nkunda had been indicted by the ICC. But it is Nkunda’s chief of staff, Bosco Ntaganda, who has been indicted by the ICC.)
To a certain extent, then, the situation in eastern DRC might well mirror that in northern Uganda, where the issuing and pursuit of criminal indictments against leaders of insurgent forces makes the conclusion of a working peace agreement that much harder– if not, actually, impossible so long as the indictments are outstanding.
I could note, too, that the northern Uganda situation is very closely linked to that in eastern DRC, since the bulk of Joseph Kony’s Ugandan-insurgent force, the LRA, is currently holed up in the rain forests of northeastern DRC, just a few hundred kilometres north of the spot where Nkunda is creating his current havoc.
Bottom line on all the many conflicts roiling the central-Afircan interior these days: the governments and peoples involved and the powerful nations of the world all need to get together on a stabilization and socio-economic reconstruction plan for all these countries that aims at saving and improving the lives of their peoples, including through the provision of effective and accountable mechanisms to ensure public security, ending all the outstanding (and often inter-linked) conflicts in a “fair enough” way, and extensive investment in DDR activities.
Memo to the incoming Obama-ites: There is NO military “solution” to any of these conflicts! Don’t even think that supporting the continued militarization of central African societies will bring anything other than continued atrocities and carnage.

R. Emanuel apologizes for dad’s racist comments

Today, Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who will be Barack Obama’s chief of staff in the White House, called up the president of the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), former Congresswoman Mary Rose Oakar, and apologized for the racist, anti-Arab remarks his father made when his appointment to the future Obama White House was announced. (HT: Bob Spencer.)
The ADC’s website tells us that,

    In the phone call, Congressman Emanuel said, “From the fullness of my heart, I personally apologize on behalf of my family and me. These are not the values upon which I was raised or those of my family.” During the phone call, Emanuel added, it is unacceptable to make remarks such as these against any ethnic or religious group.

Well, let’s hope he was not raised on anti-Arab values, though his father’s long history in the terrorist Irgun movement makes it quite possible that he was.
Still, the apology is extremely welcome. It gives acknowledgment that Emanuel’s father’s remarks were indeed offensive and quite inappropriate– something that some commenters here at JWN had tried to disprove.
Kudos to ADC for having raised the issue directly with Rahm Emanuel (with a ‘cc’ copy to Barack Obama, too.)
Let’s hope this whole incident, occurring at such a seminal point in the formation of Obama’s governing team, has succeeded in raising the awareness of everyone in the incoming administration to the wide incidence of anti-Arab racism in many portions of American society; to the need to include in the highest reaches of the US government representatives of all the ethnicities that make up the American melting point, including Arab-Americans– and to the fact that the United States’ national interests are not, indeed, always co-terminous with those of whatever government happens to be in power at any given point in Rahm Emanuel’s father’s homeland, Israel.
I’d just like to make one final point here– concerning the mainstream media in the US. I have found no call in any mainstream publication, prior to today, for Rahm Emanuel to distance himself in any way from his father’s horrible utterance. Just imagine how different the situation would have been if the father of a non-Jewish chief of staff had, on learning of his son’s appointment, made some equally hateful and derogatory statement about Jews. The New York Times editorial page– and all other major media in the US– would have been abuzz with the issue!
But an expression of anti-Arab racism gets nothing like the same treatment. In fact it is only today, after Rahm Emanuel did the right thing, that the US MSM have paid any real attention to the issue at all…

Let’s see the audacity in Obama’s Mideast policy, too!

I loved Paul Krugman’s column in the NYT today.
He was arguing that Barack Obama could learn a lot from studying the record of the “New Deal” policies enacted by Franklin Roosevelt in response to the economic crisis of the 1930… And in particular, from the fact that FDR’s economic policies almost failed– because they weren’t bold enough, soon enough.
Krugman makes a strong case for this argument, at both the economic and political levels. But reading the column, I thought an almost exactly similar case could be made regarding Middle East policy.
For the past 16 years, US diplomacy regarding the Middle East has been both atomized and painfully incrementalist. Under both Clinton and George W. Bush, the US government sought to keep its policy on Iraq and the Gulf as separate as possible from its policy on Arab-Israeli affairs; and within the domain of Arab-Israeli affairs it worked hard to keep each of the negotiating tracks separate while giving Israel ample time to stall and stall forever on all of them.
The policies pursued by Washington in both the Arab-Israeli theater and the Gulf region have failed. Now, if the war-battered peoples of this vital region are to see their lives stabilized, then a much broader and bolder approach should be used.
The Baker-Hamilton report of December 2006 certainly recommended this. It’s time to pull it off the shelf quickly– along with the records of the old Madrid Conference of 1991, and prepare for a whole new, Mideast-wide stabilization effort… To be undertaken in close coordination with the other four permanent Members of the Security Council.
Obama has written about “the audacity of hope.” So now, to keep the hope alive, let’s have some real audacity of diplomatic action.

More on R. Emanuel and US Mideast policy

In this post yesterday I wrote that Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s pick as WH chief of staff, was a dual, Israeli and US citizen. And I added,

    There is a good question as to whether anyone occupying such a sensitive position in Washington ought to also hold the citizenship of a foreign country– or whether, in the circumstances, Rahm Emanuel should lay down his foreign citizenship.

I based my judgment that Emanuel is a dual citizen on the well-known facts of the citizenship and longtime political involvement that his father has had in that country, on Rahm’s having served “in a civilian capacity” with the Israel Defense Forces in 1991, and on this Nov. 2 posting on Israel’s Y-net (Yediot Aharonot) website, which is headlined, “Obama’s Israeli adviser: Next White House chief of staff?”
On reflection, I am not sure that asking Emanuel to “lay down” his Israeli citizenship– if he still holds it, which I assume he does– would really be meaningful. After all, any person from anywhere in the world who is recognized by Israel’s rabbis as Jewish is entitled to Israeli citizenship the moment he sets foot in Israel, no questions asked.
But what I as a US citizen want to be assured of at this point is two things:

    1. At any point that the interests of the US and the current government of Israel might diverge, can we be assured that all members of our president’s staff are acting 100% in the interests of the United States? and
    2. Can we be assured that the president is getting the widest range of excellent, relevant, and fact-based advice from all his advisers in the tricky and very sensitive realms of Mideast policy?

regarding the first point, the assumption publicly expressed by most members of the US political elite in recent years– though not always– has been that “this could never happen.” Political leaders in the US spend so much time having to do their ritual dance of pro-Israeli obeisance in front of AIPAC in which they stress over and over and over that they have Israel’s best interests at heart, and that the policies of Israel only strengthen and never undermine US interests that many of them seem to come to internalize the belief that this is indeed the case.
Ain’t true.
The last leading American political figures who understood that there are, on occasion, serious divergences of interest between the US and the current government of Israel were Pres. George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, Jim Baker. They played hardball with Israel’s Likud PM Yitzhak Shamir back in 1991, at a time when Shamir wanted to get $10 billion worth of US loan guarantees and Bush and Baker sought to condition that aid on Israel not proceeding with plans to yet further expand its colonialist settlement project in the occupied territories.
Oh yes, 1991 was also the year that Mr. Emanuel took time off from being an American and went and served with Israel’s military. That happened, I think, a little earlier than the contest of wills between Bush and Shamir broke out in full force. But still, it was a period when many people understood that you might have to make a choice between the two affiliations. He made his.
And then, in 2003, Rahm Emanuel was the only member of Illinois’s congressional delegation who supported the invasion of Iraq… That was another significant choice he made– and one for which he should certainly, five years and 4,000-plus US service-members’ lives later, be held accountable…
But I guess on my point 1 above, for now we just have to trust Barack Obama’s good sense.
And that is where my point #2 becomes very important. We could have all kinds of trust in Obama’s good intentions– but if he doesn’t have access to good, impartial, and broadly based advice on matters Middle Eastern, then all his good intentions may well end up counting for little.
So let’s see who else gets appointed to high positions in his cabinet and in those sub-cabinet positions that have a direct impact on the Middle East. If it is wall-to-wall people with strong and partisan pro-Israeli track records, then we will have to conclude that our country– and Barack Obama– will be in real trouble.
And what influence might Rahm Emanuel have on such high-level appointments? Zero, constructive, or destructive/suppressive? We don’t know yet.
If Obama and R. Emanuel are smart, they will take this opportunity to appoint people who haven’t popped right out of the AIPAC-designed cookie cutter. As the (incidentally, Jewish-American) former high State Department Mideast policy official Aaron Miller has recently been writing and saying, one of the big problems with the Clinton presidency was that they didn’t have nearly enough high-level input from people who understood the Arab and Islamic worlds. Indeed, for much of their “analysis” on Arab and regional political matters, as well as for much of the actual crafting and carrying of high-level messages, they had to rely on someone whose expertise was solely that of a linguistic interpreter.
That happened because the numerous people available to the administration, from within and outside the government bureaucracy, who had a lengthy, experience-based understanding of all aspects of regional politics had nearly all been systematically excluded from the inner corridors of power. By the lobby and its many supporters inside and outside the administration.
And that happened under Clinton, remember. The, that exclusion of anyone with real regional expertise continued with a vengeance under George W. Bush. On matters Iraqi, as well as Arab-Israeli.
So now, let’s see what the next batch of Obama’s high-level appointments brings. If it brings in people who really understand many aspects of Middle East dynamics– that is, those of Israel and of the region’s many other countries– and who understand, too, that it is quite possible that at times the interests of the US and of the sitting government in Israel might diverge, and that in those circumstances the US government should, of course, pursue its own people’s interests… then that would be excellent.
(Hey, how about my old Oxford class-mate– and natural-born US citizen– Dr. Rashid Khalidi for one of those posts?)
And if if the hardline ideologues and discourse-suppressors in the pro-Israel community should complain about such appointments, as they surely would– then President-elect Obama and his chief of staff will be in a great position to tell those critics to go jump in a lake.
It is, after all, the content of the new administration’s policy that should be kept firmly in focus. Its fairness, its plausibility, and its effectiveness.
But how to get to a fair and effective policy?
Not, I would say, by continuing to buy into and help propagate the myth that the interests of the US and of all possible Israeli governments are always the same. Because they aren’t.