American-Style Buffet

A new Middle East and now a new America? We would believe Barack Obama without the slightest hesitation if only his good intentions were accompanied by a little more determination and rigor with regard to his insatiable Israeli ally.

It’s not the first time that the current president of the United States has offered a spectacular opening to the Arab-Muslim world. If his speech this Thursday, delivered in front of accredited foreign diplomats to the United States, has taken on an exceptional significance, it is because it came in the wake of two major developments: the Arab Spring and the physical annihilation of bin Laden, whose violent message had already been surpassed by the first of these events.

What has changed in Washington is that an outstretched hand is no longer being offered to impersonal entities — the nations and even the peoples of the region — but, in a manner that could not be more explicit, to the forces of evolution and progress which are now bravely confronting the repression of totalitarian regimes. It is alongside these revolutions that the American colossus is positioning itself now, despite its long history of devotion to the ostentatious display of friendship or a guilty complacency towards some of the most formidable dictators of the region. Hopefully, the geometrically flexible support offered to the Arab revolutions today will not vary in the future except in the right direction …

Exit the Egyptian Mubarak and the Tunisian Ben Ali; Gadhafi’s fate is practically sealed, and the list is certainly not yet finished. Obama’s warning did not spare even his allies, such as the president of Yemen or the king of Bahrain, who were insistently encouraged to discharge ballast before it’s too late. The President of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, occupies a singular position among this unappealing portrait gallery. He is not exactly a friend of the United States; on the other hand, he is not considered by the Americans — or the Israelis — as a totally irredeemable enemy, at least no more so than his father (and predecessor) was. Hence, the relative patience in recent weeks, despite the violent repression which the president has imposed on his country and which alone can explain the fears of an Islamic take-over should the Ba’athist regime collapse. And yet, it is this persistent ambiguity that has largely come to characterize the Cornelian dilemma that has Obama cornered: Will it eventually lead to the necessary and inevitable transition process — an option that significantly surpasses the simple reforms called for yesterday — or will it be necessary to consider a forced departure?

As for the Arab-Israeli conflict, the United States president is offering a strange cheesecake topped with sweet-and-sour-sauce to its protagonists. For the first time, he has clearly asserted his support for the cohabitation of two states in Palestine, even if in affirming the Jewishness of Israel, he has excluded any possibility of return for the Palestinian refugees. Obama advocates a return to the 1967 borders, which is also a major first, but he has left the door open to territory exchanges, suggesting a written commitment to George W. Bush with regard to the possibility of allowing Israel to retain the majority of the colonies which have been established in Jordan. This prospect is all the more troubling given that in his historic 2009 Cairo speech, the American president had declared a freeze on Jewish colonization to be an essential condition for the peace process.

As a scathing welcome to Vice-President Joe Biden, Israel announced, at that time, a new and vast program of colonization. And the president hadn’t even finished speaking Thursday when the construction of over 1,500 buildings in the occupied Arab section of Jerusalem was authorized: an insult occurring within hours of the apparently stormy meeting that took place yesterday at the White House with a never-contented Benjamin Netanyahu — an insult reiterated at the end of that encounter when, in front of cameras, the Israeli Prime Minister categorically rejected the very idea of a return to the 1967 borders proposed by his host.

It is, above all, with his Israeli protégé that there is an obstacle, once again, for the American peace-maker: sad proof that — as far as peace is concerned — nothing’s new.