Israel Update for June 2009

David Dolan

Two speeches dominated the news in Israel during the month of June; one by American President Barack Obama and the other by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Both leaders focused on the future of the volatile Middle East. Obama called again for Israel to immediately halt all settlement expansion and pledged to work for the establishment of a Palestinian state on Israel's doorsteps. Netanyahu surprised some of his political allies by accepting the concept of a two state solution, but added conditions that Palestinian leaders quickly rejected.

Israeli officials welcomed the outcome of Lebanon's parliamentary elections, held in early June. They were particularly elated that the radical Shiite Hizbullah movement did not succeed in its attempts to win ascendancy over pro-western political parties. However an Israeli military leader warned that the group's militia wing is still preparing to attack Israel in order to avenge the assassination of its top commander last year in Syria.

As in the rest of the world, Israeli government and military leaders were riveted by the violent protests in Iran that followed what most consider a rigged national election. The vote brought a second term in office to the rogue state's malevolent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Although it is still considered a remote prospect, the widespread street demonstrations were welcomed as a confirmation that the country's repressive theocratic dictatorship-which constantly forecasts Israel's total destruction-is not acceptable to many Iranian citizens. However Israeli officials were concerned when Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khameini, accused "Zionist forces" of stirring up the unrest rocking his country.

Honouring Islam

America's first ever president with Islamic African ancestry came to the vast continent on June 4 to deliver a major foreign policy address centered on the turbulent Middle East. However his initial regional stop the day before was in Saudi Arabia, the seat of Islam, which some Israeli commentators thought was intended to bolster his popularity in the Muslim world. The US President did not visit Israel.

Obama's long awaited speech, delivered in Cairo Egypt, enhanced his standing among regional Muslims, with the US leader quoting from what he reverently termed "the holy Koran" no less than seven times. His accurate use of several Arabic terms related to his father's religion also brought him instant applause from the mainly Egyptian audience.

Some Israeli experts on Islam noted that Muslims generally feel humiliated by the history of prolonged foreign domination of their lands, mainly by European Christian colonists. Therefore, to have a sitting American president give a seeming stamp of endorsement to their sacred scriptures by quoting or referring to some of them was a source of great pride, which Obama-who spent time as a boy with his Muslim father in the world's largest Islamic nation, Indonesia-apparently anticipated.

The US president spoke in nearly messianic terms of his desire to help heal the historic tensions between the largely Christian West and Islam, and his wish to bring lasting peace to the Middle East. Without using the word terrorism even once, he derided the "violent extremism" displayed by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaida movement. He also called for enhanced human rights for Muslim women, and urged Islamic states to modernize their financial systems in order to better participate in the global economy.

Suffering

In his remarks about Israel, Obama urged Islamic nations to recognize the small country as a legitimate and permanent state in the mainly Muslim Middle East. He added that Muslims around the world need to acknowledge that the Holocaust occurred and that the Jewish people had suffered during centuries of exile from their ancestral homeland. But he quickly added that the Palestinians have also "suffered in pursuit of a homeland," adding that "occupation" forced them to "endure daily humiliations."

President Obama had some scolding words for the Palestinians as well. He said "resistance through violence and killing is wrong, and it does not succeed."

Some Israeli commentators were not happy that the internationally popular American leader termed terrorist violence as "resistance," therefore giving it some legitimacy while at the same time decrying it. They noted that the Palestinians only became an "occupied" people prone to "resist" such an apparently evil condition as a result of two wars forced upon Israel by the Palestinians and their regional Arab cousins. Had the local Arab leadership and neighboring countries like Egypt, Jordan and Syria accepted the 1947 United Nations partition plan, as Israeli leaders did at the time (and then later attempted with Soviet support to wipe out the small Jewish state in 1967, and again in 1973), there would have been no warfare refugees, and definitely no "occupation."

Israeli officials were somewhat alarmed when President Obama endorsed Iran's "right to pursue peaceful nuclear power." But they were mollified when he followed that statement by noting that Iran's UN-censored programme was propelling "a hugely dangerous arms race" in the region.

Halt Settlement Construction