Facts

It is well known that Barack Obama, the American president elect is, for a number of reasons, highly esteemed worldwide. First, he is the first black president of the USA and the first Democrat to follow the two terms of the current Republican president, George W.Bush, comprising eight of America’s worst years. Also, Obama’s life story is a great one, for he ascended the American social ladder, step by step, battled fiercely until he was nominated by the Democratic Party and finally crushed the Republican candidate in 4th November elections.

Surprisingly, some in our Arab world eyed Obama’s victory as the magical solution to all our problems, as if he will stand up for our interests in the White House. It is a fact that the public opinion in our Arab world is driven by sentiments, that is why writers and analysts should not feed these ideas at all. Barack Obama, after all, is the president of a country of institutions. Accordingly, he will, like all the other heads of states, play to the tune of these institutions’ interests, in other words, his country’s interests.

In addition to this, and bearing in mind the fact that politics are the result of the interaction between the parties involved, we can say that Obama’s policies, in relation to the Palestinian issue and other Arab matters, will be determined by the interaction between the new American administration and our governments and the extent to which our regimes can crystallize their viewpoints and create room for mutual interests with the USA. In this way, Obama’s attitudes towards our region will be in conformity with our ability to adopt concrete policies that only understand the language of interests and rule out anything else that may affect negatively the parties involved.