Obama Has Broken with the Arab World

The Arab press has reacted virulently to the United States’ decision to veto the Palestinian petition to enter the U.N. In light of this harshness, one might expect the media to be hoping for a speech like the one Barack Obama gave to the General Assembly Monday, dealing definitively with any hope of real change in the U.S. position on the Middle East and returning it to its traditional anti-Americanism. Here are two examples: “[The U.S. is U]sing its veto like a bully (Gulf News) and “Obama is a prisoner of Jewish lobby” (Al-Hayat Al-Jadida).

Europe hasn’t fared well either. The intermediate position between the American and Palestinian views (supported by all of the Arab governments and also, above all, by this new actor in the area: Turkey), whose advocates have endorsed Sarkozy and the majority of European capitals, has earned these comments: “Sarkozy’s proposals are only good for Israel” (Al-Quds Al-Arabi), and “The intermediate line of the Europeans makes me laugh,” wrote the Palestinian intellectual Mutassim Hamadeh in the Lebanese daily An-Nahar.

Apart from these reactions, very disturbing analyses have been published about the short-term and long-term consequences that could occur. One of the most emphatic has been signed by Rami G. Khouri in another daily Lebanese newspaper, the Daily Star, which is published in English and has always been relatively connected with Western positions in the Middle East: “The new conflict that sees the Arab world confronting the Israeli-American combine will not be fought with military means, as has been the case since 1947 during the old Arab-Israeli conflict … exploring political and other peaceful means of standing up to, resisting and challenging Israel and America in the same manner that the world did with Apartheid South Africa decades ago. … Israel-America … is now the “new South Africa.”