What Obama Didn’t Say

President Obama said everything except the essential. He said that a Palestinian State should be established according to the 1967 borders, next to an Israeli Jewish state. Ouch! That’s exactly the problem. This would mean that the Palestinians driven out by the Israelis in the course of war are “out.” He halfheartedly pointed that out, while declaring that the two problems of Jerusalem and of the refugees are thorny and we should tackle resolving them “after.” It’s as if he’s apologizing, in saying that his Israeli friends should start by accepting the evidence that Palestine has always existed and nobody can erase the name “Palestine” as it appears in the Bible.

However, he was completely mistaken by implying that certain Palestinians have fewer rights than others and that a Jew from the Ukrainian plains, Belarus, Ethiopia, Europe or from elsewhere has more rights than a Palestinian whose ancestors lived on Palestine soil for hundreds of years. In addition, he’s forgetting that Jerusalem isn’t the property of one group of people, but all of humanity and that above all this holy city is the property of the people who have lived within its walls continuously for hundreds of years, even if Israel is now trying its best to get away with publicly erasing the traces of the ancient city from all of humanity despite the advice from their “friend,” the United States.

If, as was said, the United States is Israel’s great friend, it should tell the truth — the whole truth, in particular that it usurped other people’s land and that it is continuing to do so by colonizing and stealing the rest, that it believes it has been given power by divine authority to do so, that it killed Palestinians with impunity and flippancy without batting an eyelid and lastly, that it killed men and women who came unarmed to try and cross a border not to come to their despoiled homeland, but at least to breathe its oxygen, which the United States declared in order to create a diversion and to excuse the crime: “Shame!” adding that protesters were pushed by Syria to do so, that they, the United States, helped “their friends, the Jewish people” to perpetrate the crime of theft of the Palestinians’ homeland and are accomplices in all crimes that ensued. We can tell the story but, ironically, everyone knows it.

Ignoring the problem of the Palestinian refugees and their right to recover their despoiled land, and declaring Israel a Jewish state, nips a unique opening to justice in the bud. It is not the millions that it’s going to give to Egypt or to Tunisia or their exhortations to Saleh, Assad and Khalifa that are going to change anything about the naked truth that there are hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are always going to converge toward the borders of the promised land and who will end up reaching it one way or another.

If he were, as he claims, the true friend of Israel, he would have advised coming to a fair solution that gives Palestinians their rights in a multi-religious country where Jews, Christians and Muslims will be able to live together on Palestine soil. Even if it isn’t the Jews’ property, Palestinians will be able to be magnanimous. The reason is simple: The Palestinians never accepted and will never accept, especially now that they’re boosted by the new Arabic renaissance, being dispossessed of their land by foreigners, even after generations, and they will do everything to return to it, willingly or by force.

Israel is permitted to be a Jewish state while no other Western democracy allows this discrimination on their soil. That is the height of hypocrisy. President Obama suggested a necessary but insufficient condition for making peace.