generalspeaking

Even-Handed Manipulations

President Barack Obama is experiencing tough times. Gone the euphoria of his early days in office when everyone loved him and nothing went wrong, and the future stretched out on a red carpet of successful administration, bringing America back into the hearts of the international community. No one enjoys being socially and politically ostracized, and it's demeaning for a powerful country to suffer constant international criticism and disdain.

The new administration brought with it a clean sweep and a large anticipation quotient of change. There hasn't, in fact, been much in the way of change. Except for the collapsed economy that went deeper into the dungeon of despair after the presidential inauguration. Already groaning under the weight of two war fronts, the administration was in no position to launch its own needful internal programs to advance an agenda of assistance for its poor.

And the country's national debt has plunged so far into a well of unanticipated depth that its yet-to-be-born taxpayers will be its sad inheritors. While the American troop presence in the war in Iraq is winding down its active commitment, it has ramped up in Afghanistan, and U.S. troops continue to be sacrificed to a seemingly impossible-to-achieve end resulting in a free-from-fanaticism and sovereign country.

The imposition of some notional appearance of universal public health care insured by tax dollars for the entire population is becoming increasingly elusive, even defying the silver-tongued pleadings of President Obama. A solution to the grey-bearded Middle East Conflict is no closer to resolution resulting in a state for the long-suffering Palestinian population than it ever has been; in fact it appears ever more dim.

This sterling new president of the United States appears to have lost some of his confidence, though none of his audacity. Anyone, regardless of resolute mettle would be nettled and unsettled by the complexity of the circumstances in which President Obama now finds himself. Unlike his predecessors to quite the same degree, he has sought to impose a solution of the MidEast conflict, mostly by leaning heavily on Israel.

It is incumbent upon Israel to prepare herself for sacrifices to bring the Palestinian Authority (let's not even mention Gaza/Hamas) to the bargaining table, beginning, but not ending with a building freeze in the West Bank, preparatory to dismantling all West Bank settlements (Jewish communities of long-standing establishment). Which, at first, seemed a sound idea, and then one recalls the wasted opportunity of pulling Israeli settlers out of Gaza, and those end-results.

Yet President Obama insists, to a recalcitrant and defiant Prime Minister Netanyahu that the freeze of 'natural growth' is a premier condition for talks to resume. To which end President Obama holds out the unappealing carrot of beaming favourably upon Israel should it relent and agree to his conditions to re-starting talks. (Including leaving illegally-built Arab homes in east Jerusalem intact.)

He will personally chair a meeting between PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Netanyahu prior to the opening of the UN General Assembly.

Of course there's also the inconvenient reality that the Palestinian Authority is supposed to be pledged to making strenuous efforts to avoid stimulating its restless youth to creating havoc and violence within Israel. Order and good governance appears to be eluding the PA as a constructive concept leading to the potential for peace between itself and Israel.

Any nation whose relations with an adversary includes ongoing demonization and assaults by creatures of that adversary is obviously not going to be anxious to commit to a guarantee resulting in good fellowship. Nor, moreover, does it represent a signal of entente when one partner in an emerging engagement teaches its impressionable young generation that the other partner represents an illegal entity encroaching on its inalienable right to territory.

Most particularly when that territory constitutes the land on which the partner has been established. It is a situation quite clearly antagonistic to mutual understanding. One that clearly is meant to result in a hostile reaction. As it is, the PA has long made it an established and institutionalized practise to not only incite violence against Israel, but it also teaches its young to distrust and hate its neighbour.

To the extent that children are taught in the PA school system that the state of Israel squats squarely on Palestinian land. Land that will eventually be recovered from Israel by Palestinians for the establishment of their own state on the entirety of the territory, partition be damned. This, in obviously direct violation of demands of the road map to peace. This is the internal message, in opposition to the message promulgated for Western digestion.

Young Palestinians are praised when they correctly identify Jewish sites as Palestinian-owned areas. The textbooks used by PA children use a curriculum carefully planned to inculcate in the children a sense of being besieged, of being wronged, of victimization which they will, in future, take steps to overturn. Television programs prompting children to respond to loaded questions about Palestinian ownership of Israeli sites bolster the manipulation of children's perceptions.

Thus far, although there is ample documentation to attest to these practices, and they have been ongoing with little discretion for a very long time, inuring children against the prospect of accepting Israelis as neighbours and prompting them to consider themselves future warriors in the quest for Palestinian statehood at the expense of Israeli nationhood, there has been no hint of reproach addressed to the PA and Mahmoud Abbas from President Obama.

Waiting, waiting. With bated breath.

Labels: Conflict, Israel, Political Realities, United States

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, September 03, 2009