Chess Match

In their first meeting as heads of state at the White House, Barack Obama tells Benjamin Netanyahu that the Middle East and Israel are on the verge of a historical opportunity for peace.

Translated from the diplomatic language, the language of lies and diplomatic euphemisms, this statement means that this train set in motion by Obama will be the last of the night before any hypothesis of peace will fade away for generations of new Israeli and Arabic bloodshed.

If it’s easy to think and invoke peace when you’re 9,400 km from Jerusalem or Gaza, rather than under the rain of Hamas’ rockets or under the daily spread of illegal Israeli settlements, this first taste of a never-ending tragedy has had the taste of desperation for Obama.

Netanyahu’s answer, who became prime minister after holding an electoral campaign to the thesis “two countries, two states” with radical hatred, was predictable; we might call it ritual for someone who could never have denied his electoral platform, and the ideas of his most important ally, that of Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who publicly announced a directional shift and renounced the agreements reached at Annapolis in 2007. Two years ago, at the end of that meeting sponsored by George Bush and held by Condoleeza Rice against the skepticism of Arabic countries, all the parties finally recognized Israel as the country of Jewish people, and Olmert’s Jewish government formally accepted the two-state solution. That was what Netanyahu refused to sign yesterday, claiming that it hadn’t been ratified by the Knesset, the Jerusalem Parliament.

Barack Obama is trying to make a new start from ground zero, from the crater opened by the double failure of the military option wanted by Bush and the theorists of the Iraq regime change that should have caused a virtuous cascade effect in Palestine, too; he’s trying to start all over again from the violent retaliation of Israel against Hamas’ attacks in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. He hopes – and most people call him naïve – that his mediation skills, the strength of his charisma, the significance of a new American season can shift the boulder against whom all American presidencies have shattered. Obama believes in the decisive force of dialogue and persuasion, and made the “mystic of the table,” as we say in Italy, the philosophical stone of his message; for him, the Middle East has the potential for a sensational success, as well for an historical failure at the same time.

That’s why, after the initial castling of “Bibi the Tough,” the undisputed idol of the hawks in the Israeli-American community who condition so many governments, Obama will see Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak over the next few days; he’s the leader and president of what is now called “the half-Palestine,” cut into two pieces by Hamas in Gaza, and crumbled daily by those fortified Israelis villages that even yesterday, while “Bibi” was in the Oval Office, have seen in the alleged Palestine the opening of another yard in the place of a military camp, according to a project already approved in 2008.

Obama’s hope (the same expressed by the first Netanyahu government between 1996 and 1999) is that this narrow-minded and challenging attitude towards public international opinion, and that the American government itself – that consider this last one, as well as the others, an illegal settlement – is just an exchange pawn. A move to divert the attention of the most intolerant Israelis right-wing (the one represented by Lieberman) from the return to that road map towards peace that Israelis say they want to respect. The optimists remember that this is a classic political expedient: to use an ideological coverage to hide rational choices, like the fierce anti-communist Nixon did when he recognized China, or like Reagan who first preached against the Evil Empire of the Soviet Union, and then became the gentle interlocutor of the last red emperor, Mikhail Gorbachev. The pessimists, or the optimists who don’t suffer from amnesia, instead keep asking the question against whom all the hopes for a just and definitive solution in the Middle East have shattered over the past 60 years: Who is really interested in peace, besides those who live in the Gaza ghetto or in the small West Bank? Are the people who do look forward for peace the ones who don’t really matter in the rich game of war?