Frustrated Hopes?

One year after US President Barack Obama’s historic speech at Cairo University, hopes of change are giving way to disappointment in the Arab and Muslim world, Gihan Shahine reports

Last year Muslims around the world who had been feeling wronged and bullied under the former Bush administration in the United States were anticipating President Barack Obama’s speech at Cairo University with hope and cautious optimism. When Obama reached out to Muslim countries with his message of goodwill, hopes rose higher in the Arab and Muslim world, and they climaxed following last year’s speech at Cairo University, which was laced with verses taken from the Holy Quran and rich in generous gestures.

However, one year later such hopes have given way to frustration, with people feeling that all they have been given are messages of reconciliation and nothing has happened on the ground. There is a gathering consensus in Muslim nations worldwide that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict remains an open wound, and that without progress made towards healing it, or towards achieving the withdrawal of US forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama’s messages of goodwill will not achieve their target of forging a new beginning in the US’s relations with the Muslim and Arab world.

After all, observes veteran writer and political analyst Fahmy Howeidy, politics is not about “good intentions”, but is rather about “good deeds”. As far as Obama is concerned, good intentions have not “materialised into good deeds”, Howeidy notes, reducing Obama’s speech to a mere public-relations exercise.

“The speech was a good exercise in public relations for the new American administration, which succeeded in giving a new image to the United States,” says Mustafa Kamel El-Sayed, a professor of political science at the American University in Cairo (AUC).

An equally disappointed veteran writer, Salama Ahmed Salama, concurs. “The speech perhaps served its prime target of improving the severely damaged image of the US in the Middle East and of quelling anti-US sentiments in the region,” he says. “But it has not offered concrete solutions when it comes to issues in the Middle East” Salama told the Weekly.

People do not necessarily think that Obama was not well-intentioned in his attempts to bridge the gap between the US and the Arab and Muslim world. “Obama definitely wanted a freeze on the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories, and he wanted an end to Iran’s nuclear programme and an uncomplicated exit from Iraq,” El-Sayed insists. “However, none of these issues has been realised, simply because the US president is not the only one who decides foreign policy.”

It is common knowledge that American foreign policy is a complex affair that is not determined exclusively by the White House. “There are other institutions that have their say in the making of foreign policy,” El-Sayed says, including the National Security Council, the State Department, the Defense Department, the Congress and a number of think tanks closely involved in the process of foreign policy-making.

“Even inside the White House, the president is surrounded by advisers who have their own views, biases and interests. It is very rare for these institutions to agree on a certain line of policy, or agree on concrete steps to be taken in order to translate a certain line of policy into action.” Meanwhile, according to El-Sayed, the US is no longer the sole power in the world that can tell other countries what they have to do.

“Obama seems to have come from outside the US context, and so he may have miscalculated when he thought he could make changes in the face of Israeli power and its strong lobby in the US,” Salama says.

This lobby, according to Abdus Sattar Ghazali, editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective, considers even the most “cosmetic criticism of Israel intolerable”. According to Ghazali, two-thirds of the members of the US House of Representatives signed an American- Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) letter calling for an end to the Obama administration’s criticism of Israel.

“Also last year,” Ghazali added, “32 senators urged the administration to take action to block the Goldstone Report on Israeli atrocities in Gaza from reaching the UN Security Council.” In a letter to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the senators urged the Obama administration to refuse to take action against Israel as a result of the report’s findings, according to Ghazali.

Obama himself did not gamble with the US’s relations with Israel when he addressed the Arab world from the podium of Cairo University last year. His speech was widely seen as carefully worded and non-committal and even lacking in substance. Obama made it clear in his speech that Israel’s relationship with the US was “unbreakable”, which many explained at the time as a way of preparing the Arabs to make concessions on any resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Whereas Obama glossed over the sufferings of the Palestinian people, he dwelled on the estimated six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Europe. His mention of the Palestinians’ right to the establishment of a Palestinian state did not include details of what the borders of this state would be. “It goes without saying that no one can change the US’s historic bonds with Israel, but the new president was hoping to reshape them,” Salama nevertheless insists.

Many agree that Obama’s speech at Cairo University was not only about reaching out to the Arab and Muslim worlds, bridging gaps and softening any suspicions of a “clash of civilisations”. Rather, the speech was also seen as a way of indicating that the new US president was getting the world ready for a new US policy, and Obama did take a new tone towards Israel, insisting on a two-state solution and reiterating the message of the need to freeze new settlement building.

“Obama tried to reach such targets, sometimes even offering Israel political bribes by promising to upgrade its arsenal of weapons and so on,” Salama says.

However, politics is a game of power, and in that game the Arab states have had few cards to play, which they have not attempted to use. Neither Howeidy nor Salama emphasise Obama’s failure to achieve progress in the Middle East, instead blaming the Arab states for not making the most of the new circumstances, or acting in a way that, in Howeidy’s words, “would make the new president respect them or fight for their rights”.

There is almost a consensus among analysts that the Arab regimes have succumbed to US and Israeli demands without trying hard enough to achieve any gains in return, wasting the cards they hold in their hands that could be used to tip the balance towards achieving progress on the Palestinian issue.

“At a time when a country like Turkey was perhaps assuming the role of the Arab states, gaining political weight and respect for its independent policies and forcing the US to respect it, Egypt was toeing the US and Israeli line, tightening the grip on Hamas, building a steel wall on the border with the Gaza Strip, and taking up the US’s hardline policy towards Iran, Syria and Lebanon, without any reason and without trying to gain anything in return,” Salama says.

With such pressures from both within and outside the United States, it has come as no surprise to many that Obama has achieved no progress in the Middle East. “On the contrary,” Ghazali scoffs, “under the Netanyahu government things have got worse for the Palestinians.” Binyamin Netanyahu’s refusal to stop settlement activities can be described as a major blow to Obama’s and US envoy George Mitchell’s efforts to build trust among the Palestinians and bring the Arabs to the negotiating table.

Israel has also become more blatant about defying Obama’s policies by announcing that it will build new settlements in East Jerusalem. “The Obama administration failed to press Israel to freeze settlement building in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and thus pave the way to a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians,” Ghazali laments.

However, the future may be even grimmer than such comments indicate, since, according to Ghazali, midterm congressional elections are due later this year in the US, in which the Israel lobby plays an important role. “No incumbent US congressmen or congressional candidate will take a stand that will be perceived as anti-Israel during the election campaign,” Ghazali explains, adding that Obama himself would not “offend the Israeli lobby, which could jeopardise his re-election for a second term.”

Obama’s reiterated assurances that he would not abandon US diplomatic efforts in the “pursuit of a two-state solution that ensures the rights and security of both Israelis and Palestinians,” as he put it when addressing the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship in Qatar last April, would now seem to be falling on deaf ears. A majority among the Arab and Muslim political elite now believes that solutions to the problems of the Middle East will have to come from within, rather than from outside, the region.

Few analysts now pin much hope on the new US president when it comes to the Middle East.

Even among the wider public, hopes have largely evaporated. A public opinion survey conducted last month on a random sample of 1,198 Palestinian adults in the West Bank and Gaza Strip indicated that Palestinian hopes that Obama would bring an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory have significantly declined in recent months.

“Only 9.9 per cent of Palestinians now believe that Obama’s policies will increase chances of achieving a ‘just peace,’ down from 23.7 per cent in October last year and 35.4 per cent in last June,” according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Yet, that said, there is still no denying that Obama’s rhetoric, which marked a sharp departure from his predecessor’s religiously- tinted discourse that almost declared war on Islam and Muslims, has served its target of improving the US’s much-tarnished image in the Middle East.

Today, Muslims around the world, according to Salama, “would now tend to view the US’s failure to solve Middle East issues in a political rather than a religious context. They would see this failure as the result of a failure in political efforts, or an imbalance in political power, and not the result of a religious bias against Muslims and Islam, as was the case during the Bush administration.”

Obama has been applauded for avoiding the use of charged terminology, such as references to “Islamo-fascism,” using the words “violent extremism” instead. It is therefore little wonder that a survey by the US-based Gallup Centre found that approval ratings for the American leadership during 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, increased by a significant margin in most Arab countries when compared to 2008, Bush’s last year in office.

The numbers rose most impressively in Tunisia (from 14 per cent to 37 per cent), Algeria (25 per cent to 47 per cent), Egypt (six per cent to 25 per cent), Saudi Arabia (12 per cent to 29 per cent), and Syria (four per cent to 15 per cent). However, ratings continued to fall in Lebanon (25 per cent to 22 per cent) and Palestine (13 per cent to seven per cent), when Obama’s rhetoric was not followed through with concrete policies.

Such polls have not been enough to preserve Obama’s reputation in the Arab world. Poll results announced at a recent symposium at the Centre for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington DC warned that one year following Obama’s Cairo speech, “public hopes could turn into disappointment, especially with regard to Middle East peace, unless the Obama administration begins delivering on some of its Cairo promises.”

The polls indicated that although there had been “some improvement in the way Muslims view the US since Obama took office,” there was also “still a lot of anger towards America, especially regarding the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.” According to Steven Kull, director of the Centre’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes, people in the Middle East are interested in seeing the US “putting more pressure on Israel”.

A survey of America’s image among Arab young people, conducted by Cairo University professor Moataz Abdel-Fattah, similarly indicated that optimism about improving US relations with the Muslim world was giving way to frustration in the absence of concrete steps regarding Middle East policies.

“For sure, his efforts are applauded,” Abdel-Fattah says, “but it is expected that he will work harder, even though Arabs know that the odds are against his efforts, especially given Netanyahu’s emphasis on continuing to build settlements.” Even for the US’s own seven- million-strong Muslim community, “who have remained under siege since the 9/11 attacks on the US, Obama’s measures have done little to make their life easier,” Ghazali says.

Although some positive changes have occurred, with Muslims getting their concerns heard on various aspects of the administration’s agenda, little has changed on the ground. Some issues that Muslim-Americans are concerned about, such as the problems facing Muslim charities, are being worked on by the administration as part of the follow-up to Obama’s Cairo speech. But many other, perhaps more pressing, issues still need to be addressed. US anti-terrorism laws have hardly changed, and the notorious US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has still not been closed.

“Despite healing words from Obama about bridging the divide between the Muslim world and the West, America’s Muslim community is subject to pervasive and persistent attacks by the federal government,” Ghazali told Al-Ahram Weekly. Meanwhile, the Arab and Muslim community in the US has yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including “excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive FBI surveillance guidelines,” he says.

Last December, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) sent a letter to Obama raising the issue of the alarming level of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States. However, according to Ghazali, “there has been no response from the administration.”

Equally disappointing is the fact that the respect that Obama expressed towards Muslims and Islamic culture from the podium of Cairo University has hardly helped the tarnished image of Islam in the US. A recent public- opinion survey conducted by the US-based Gallup research organisation has revealed that almost a year following Obama’s speech in Cairo, Islam still elicits the most negative views of all other faiths among US citizens.

Ghazali concludes by quoting a statement made by Khaled Hroub, director of Cambridge University’s Arab Media Project, which says that “the spurt of fresh air that US-Muslim relations enjoyed after Obama’s arrival in the White House is already somewhat musty and could be exhausted even before the end of his period in office and certainly after it.