Will Obama Do It?

Will Obama achieve the necessary breakthrough in the matter of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, accomplish what past U.S. presidents were incapable of and force Israel to implement the resolutions of international law? This would start with Resolution 194, which stipulates the right of return and the resolutions that call for Israel to completely withdraw from the land it occupied in 1967 — first and foremost Arab Jerusalem — and recognition of the Palestinian state on this land.

The occasion for this talk is the president’s expected visit to the region on March 20. As written in the newspaper The World Tribune, “Obama, scheduled to arrive in Israel on March 20, wants a detailed Israeli withdrawal plan from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the president’s visit.” The newspaper quoted Israeli officials as saying that “the Israeli plan would be considered in what could be an imminent U.S. initiative to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank.”

For starters, we are not optimistic about this visit; we expect it to result in nothing in favor of the Palestinian people. We expect Obama to exert pressure on the region’s leaders to resume direct negotiations with the Zionist enemy, without a commitment to stop settlements.

As for the reason for this lack of optimism, over the last seven-odd decades we have gotten used to the fact that U.S. administrations are completely biased toward the enemy, and that it is not possible for them to take one step without the enemy’s consent or without serving the enemy’s hostile goals. Here we remind readers that Obama himself demanded that Netanyahu halt settlements, at the beginning of his term, but it was not long before he backed away from this demand and bent to Netanyahu’s proposals.

Getting back to what the U.S. newspaper published, we fear that the U.S plan will be unilateral withdrawal while keeping Jerusalem, the settlements and more than half of the land of the West Bank under Israeli control. This is what Israeli newspapers insinuated early on — that Netanyahu is considering unilaterally withdrawing in the manner Sharon did when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip and kept it under Israeli control.

This is why we believe that if Obama is serious about going down in history as the countryman of President Abraham Lincoln and curtailing war in the region, he must break from the script and force his ally Israel to implement all relevant international resolutions. This includes complete withdrawal from Palestinian land occupied in 1967, most of all Jerusalem, dismantling of the settlements because they are illegal and recognition of the sovereign Palestinian state on all of this land.

President Obama will not undertake what we hope for, and he will not take after President Eisenhower, who ordered Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to withdraw from the Gaza Strip after Israel took part in the 1956 hostilities against Egypt.

Speaking of which, the president is called on not to be swept along by Jewish traditions and visit what is called the Wailing Wall, for this wall is al-Buraq,* an original part of al-Aqsa Mosque, belonging to Muslims alone, as proved by a British investigation following the 1929 Buraq Uprising.

In short, President Obama’s visit will not bring about the necessary breakthrough and will work to the advantage of the occupation by pressuring the region’s leaders to resume talks.

And we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…

*Translator’s Note: That is, the Wall of al-Buraq, the wall of al-Aqsa Mosque to which the prophet Muhammad tied the creature al-Buraq on the night that he rode al-Buraq from Mecca to Jerusalem and then in his ascension to seven heavens.