Obama in Israel: Support for Barbarism

In the context of his first visit to Israel since he came to the U.S. presidency, Barack Obama said his country is proud to be the strongest ally and greatest friend of Tel Aviv and gave assurances that the alliance between the two governments is eternal. He confirmed Washington’s firm commitment to the security of the Jewish state and noted that such support is something that makes both nations stronger and more prosperous.

It is inevitable to contrast the tone and content of the U.S. president’s speech in Israel, particularly the expressions of support and solidarity with the regime headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, to the speech nearly four years ago in Cairo, Egypt at the start of his first presidential term. In that speech, he called for reconciliation between his country and the Islamic world and stressed the intolerable situation in which the Palestinian population lives as a result of the Israeli blockade and the illegal land theft perpetrated by the Tel Aviv regime.

Such condemnations, however, together with Obama’s statements in favor of the creation of a Palestinian state, died out during his first term. He did nothing to prevent the Netanyahu government from continuing with the installation of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories or to contain Tel Aviv’s belligerence, savagery and unilateralism against its neighbors or to defend the Palestinians’ right to become a sovereign state.

Now, as can be seen, the U.S. government moves from the incongruity between words and deeds to an unprecedented rapprochement with the government of Israel and acceptance, even if tacit, of the criminal policies, in violation of international law and human rights practices, of the Jewish state in Gaza, East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights — territories that, according to international law and historical reality, are not Israel’s.

Moreover, if it’s true that the United States wants to pay for a genuine peace between Israel and its neighbors, as Obama said yesterday, he will have to strive to create minimum conditions for this to be possible. That means, first of all, condemning state terrorism practiced by Israel and forcing the authorities in Tel Aviv to halt the killings of Palestinians, stopping demographic manipulation policies in the West Bank and ending the devastating blockade of the Gaza Strip, demanding the return of land taken after 1948 that is now in Israeli territory or compensation payments for the expelled, recognizing the democratically elected Palestinian authorities — as fractured as they may be — and implementing the necessary political and economic pressures necessary to end the colonialism, expansionism and militarism of the Jewish state.

To the contrary, the nod Obama yesterday gave to Tel Aviv and the fact that the president undertook a tour of the Middle East without a concrete proposal to resolve the old conflict confirm the abandonment of some of the most advanced guidelines of the agenda with which Obama became president. They cause wonder if they were not, in fact, mere acts of simulation and public relations.