Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Obama's 'Palestinian friend' laments catastrophic U.S. policy in Mideast

Last update - 07:29 05/12/2008  	 	 	
Obama's 'Palestinian friend' laments catastrophic U.S. policy in Mideast
By Akiva Eldar
No one stopped Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University professor of 
Modern Arab Studies, at Ben-Gurion airport. Having just landed after the 
long flight from New York, the professor was anticipating the 
traditional reception from airport security personnel reserved for 
visitors with "suspicious" names. To his surprise, he entered the 
airport like anyone else, with no problems or delays. Perhaps word had 
gotten around at Ben-Gurion that he was the Palestinian friend of United 
States President-elect Barack Obama.
Khalidi, 60, who spent three weeks in Israel and the territories before 
continuing on to Beirut this week, doesn't like all the fuss surrounding 
his relationship with the president-elect. Up to now, he had avoided 
speaking about it publicly, for better or worse. The reason may be, as 
reflected in my interview with him at his hotel in Jerusalem, 
overlooking Damascus Gate, his disappointment in his Chicago friend's 
treatment of the Arab and Islamic community in the United States. Or 
maybe it's also discomfort with the Democratic candidate's response 
during the campaign to reports about the ties between them. "He is a 
respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of 
Israel's policy," said Obama in a widely publicized comment from a May 
campaign event, in response to a question about their relationship. His 
spokesman made certain to add that the president-elect has been "clear 
and consistent on his support for Israel."
"Obama was my colleague at the University of Chicago, a family friend, 
neighbor and my district representative in the Illinois State Senate," 
says Khalidi. "Since I moved to New York in 2003 and he moved to 
Washington a year later, we've had much less opportunity to remain in 
contact." In April, The Los Angeles Times reported that, at the farewell 
party at an Arab-American community center, Obama noted that they had 
shared frequent dinners and interesting conversations, adding, "I'm 
hoping that, for many years to come, we continue that conversation - a 
conversation that is necessary not just around Mona and Rashid's dinner 
table," but around "this entire world." The article further related that 
Obama said he hoped to give the Palestinians hope with a new American 
policy in the Middle East. Another one of the guests reportedly likened 
the settlers in the territories to Osama bin Laden, asserting that both 
are "blinded by ideology."
Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his running mate, 
Sarah Palin, took the story and ran with it, seeking to score some 
points with Jewish voters. "Obama is a friend of a Palestinian hater of 
Israel," proclaimed McCain. Palin attacked The Los Angeles Times for 
refusing to make public a videotape of the farewell party. Their people 
"discovered" that, during the 1980s, when the Palestine Liberation 
Organization (PLO) was considered a "terror organization," Khalidi was 
the organization's spokesman in Beirut.
Khalidi, considered the successor to Prof. Edward Said among the 
Palestinian intelligentsia, studied and taught for 12 years, until 1983, 
at the American University of Beirut and the Institute for Palestinian 
Studies there. While he did maintain connections with foreign reporters, 
he was never a PLO spokesman. Later on, between the Madrid summit in 
late 1991 and the Oslo Accords in September 1993, Faisal Husseini got 
Khalidi added as a consultant to the Palestinian delegation to the 
Madrid summit and to the bilateral talks with the Israeli team, headed 
by Elyakim Rubinstein. That was when Khalidi formed his opinion of the 
coordinator - the U.S. mediator Dennis Ross, who is one of Obama's 
advisors on foreign affairs. Khalidi alludes to him when he says in the 
interview that he hopes the new president will not bring back the same 
people who contributed to the failure of the peace process here. Nor was 
Khalidi thrilled to hear that Obama has appointed Hillary Clinton as 
Secretary of State. Clinton's courting of Israel during the darkest days 
of the intifada made her a darling of the Jewish community and distanced 
her from the Palestinian community.
Obama's campaign went on the counterattack against McCain-Palin: This is 
yet another attempt, they said, to recycle controversy and divert public 
attention from the fact that McCain supports Bush's economic policies. 
Obama's spokesman suggested that instead of berating the media's 
supposed double standards, McCain ought to explain why, during the time 
he was chairman of the International Republican Institute, for years it 
helped fund the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, an 
organization that sponsored some of Khalidi's lectures and published 
some of his work.
Khalidi, who wanted the black Democratic candidate to win, kept his head 
down and avoided the media. As the son of a political family, he is 
adept at swimming in such murky waters. His family tree in Jerusalem on 
his father's side dates back at least to the 15th century. He says it's 
quite likely that some of his ancestors, who were Chief Judges in Cairo 
during the Mameluke period, are buried in the Muslim cemetery in the 
Mamila area (the designated site of the new Museum of Tolerance). His 
uncle was the mayor of Jerusalem from 1935 to 1937, until he was deposed 
by the British Mandate authorities and exiled to the Seychelles. In the 
1950s, the uncle was appointed foreign minister of Jordan and, for a 
brief time, also served as prime minister under King Hussein.
Khalidi, who is married and has one grandchild, speaks with eloquence 
and firmness. He was born in New York in November 1948. His father, a 
university student at the time, married a woman from Lebanon and 
developed a diplomatic career as an international civil servant working 
in the UN Secretariat. After his return from Beirut, Rashid Khalidi 
earned a place of honor among the Palestinian intellectual elite, 
alongside professors Edward Said, Walid Khalidi (his cousin) and Ibrahim 
Abu Lughod. His book Under Siege: PLO Decisionmaking during the 1982 
War, was translated into Hebrew and published by Ma'arachot Press. He is 
the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University 
and served as the Director of the Middle East Institute there for five 
years, before stepping down last year. In 2006, he published his most 
recent book, "The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for 
Statehood" (Beacon Press).
After being around for about two weeks, after quite a long time away, 
what kinds of changes have you sensed in Palestinian society?
"It would be presumptuous of me, after an absence of over two years, and 
not having been able to go to Gaza, to pronounce myself on this subject. 
I will give some impressions nevertheless. I sense even greater anger 
than before in Jerusalem at the systematic choking off of the city from 
its West Bank hinterland, the unceasing pressure of new settler 
strongholds and property expropriations, and the denial of a minimal 
level of basic municipal services to Arab neighborhoods. Just compare 
the miserable state of the roads or the schools or the parks in East 
Jerusalem to those in the West. On a broader level, I detect enormous 
popular frustration and disgust with both wings of the national 
leadership, Fatah and Hamas. In spite of this crisis at the political 
level, there is an irrepressible dynamism, ingenuity and vitality in the 
Palestinian economy and society, whether in the West Bank, Gaza, East 
Jerusalem or the Palestinian community inside Israel. This is the 
underlying strength of the Palestinian people: it is like water that 
cannot be dammed up, but finds a way to get through. This resilience is 
there no matter what new refinements the occupier devises to torture his 
captive."
Do you believe that the current PLO leadership will be able to cut a 
deal with Israel on a two-state solution that will be accepted by the 
Palestinian people?
"The current PLO leadership does not and will not properly represent the 
entire Palestinian people until it can achieve a historic compromise 
with the other wing of the Palestinian national movement, and until a 
renewed, unified leadership can agree on minimal national goals and a 
strategy, whatever they are. This requires resisting the internal and 
external pressures that are intent on keeping the Palestinians divided. 
Only if they are unified do the Palestinians have a chance of achieving 
their national goals. Thereafter, to be binding and legitimate, any 
agreement that might be reached would have to be submitted to a 
referendum of the entire Palestinian people, inside and outside the 
country."
How do you see the future of the Palestinian territories?
"Both the occupation regime and the settlement enterprise have gotten 
constantly stronger since the negotiating process began in 1991 - after 
being weakened by the first intifada. These twin processes went on 
steroids after the second intifada started in 2000. If these two 
bulldozer-like endeavors are not rapidly reversed - not halted, reversed 
- then there is no possibility whatsoever of a two-state solution. These 
processes - the consecration of the occupation regime and the expansion 
of settlements - have been ongoing for 41 years. I suspect that because 
of them, combined with the blindness of Israeli leaders and the weakness 
of Palestinian leadership, there is little chance for a two-state 
solution to be implemented. And anyone who wants to implement a real, 
equitable two-state solution would have to explain in detail how they 
would uproot all or most of the settlements. Equally difficult will be 
overcoming the powerful interlocking complex of forces in Israeli 
society that have extensive material, bureaucratic, political and 
ideological interests in the Israeli state's continued control over the 
lives of 3.5 million Palestinians, a control that is exercised under the 
pretext of security."
As someone who has long been involved with the PLO and Palestinian 
politics, what can you say about the current Palestinian leadership?
"The Palestinian people have certainly not always had the leadership 
they deserved. Israel worsened this situation by systematically 
liquidating Palestinian leaders - generally the most effective and 
intelligent among them - going back to the early 1970s. Several Arab 
regimes also played a part by assassinating key PLO leaders. Historians 
have pointed to similar efforts by the Zionist movement in the late 
1930s and 1940s.
"That said, the current leadership seems to me to be lacking in several 
respects, and certainly does not seem up to the difficult tasks at hand. 
It is time for a wholesale renewal of the Palestinian leadership, and 
the replacement of the few remaining members of the founding generation 
of the modern Palestinian national movement and their entourage with 
younger individuals with new ideas. This requires a major effort to 
confront the failed policies of the current leaders of both major 
factions, and to find new approaches to the grave problems the 
Palestinian people face."
How do you assess the last eight years of U.S. conduct in the Middle 
East and specifically in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
"It has been catastrophic. It made a bad situation worse, undermined 
democracy all over the region by helping to sabotage the results of the 
2006 Palestinian elections, played a major role in splitting the 
Palestinian national movement, and helped Israel dig itself even deeper 
into the hole of a permanent occupation. The administration's other 
foolish Middle East policies, like the occupation of Iraq, the 'cold 
war' with Iran and Syria, and encouraging Sunni-Shi'ite conflict in the 
region, have all been negative in and of themselves, but they also had a 
profoundly harmful effect on the conflict between Israel and the 
Palestinians. Many American historians say George W. Bush may have been 
the worst president in American history, but his impact on this region 
has certainly been little short of a disaster."
What are your expectations of Barack Obama's administration in the 
Middle East? Do you believe he will stick to his promise to put it at 
the top of his agenda?
"I have no special insight. I do believe that the president-elect takes 
this problem very seriously, and will give it his attention. Obsessed as 
we are with our own issues, however, we should not ignore the fact that 
he faces the greatest American and global economic crisis since 1929, 
and must necessarily give that priority.
"In any case, much will depend on who is chosen for the key positions 
relating to the Middle East. If some of the unimaginative, close-minded 
and biased advocates of conventional thinking who bear a major share of 
the responsibility for the mess we have been in for over 20 years - from 
the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations to that of Clinton, even 
before George W. Bush made things even worse - are appointed to 
important posts, my expectations will be low. I was involved in the 
negotiations as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation from Madrid in 
1991 until June 1993, before Oslo. Those American officials who helped 
get the Palestinians and Israelis into the mess they are in via a deeply 
flawed negotiating process, and a cowardly refusal to confront 
occupation and settlement head-on when it would have been far easier to 
do in the 1980s and 1990s, do not deserve another chance to ruin the 
future of the peoples of this region."
Can Obama save the two-state solution, or is it too late? What would you 
suggest he could do in order to accomplish this?
"It may well be too late, as I have said. The new administration would 
have to prevail on the Israeli government to put into reverse the twin 
bulldozers of occupation and settlement. This would mean removing walls 
and barriers inside the occupied territories that separate Palestinians 
from Palestinians and allowing free movement instead of restricting the 
population to segregated inferior roads. It would mean ending land 
confiscation and the building of new residential units for settlers all 
over the occupied territories, and the return to the population of these 
territories of the land stolen from them on various 'legal' pretexts or 
without a pretext at all. In sum, it means ending Israeli security 
control over the occupied territories, and scrapping the whole 
overarching structure of the occupation regime that has constantly grown 
more deeply rooted for 41 years.
"Doing this would require a lot of the new president's political 
capital. Despite the immense significance of Barack Obama's victory in 
terms of American history and politics, I do not think things have 
necessarily changed in terms of the balance of forces in Washington 
where Israel/Palestine issues are concerned. This balance of forces is 
and has long been an obstacle to progress toward ending occupation and 
settlement and achieving peace."
Are you disappointed with Israeli intellectuals and the peace camp?
"I respect what many Israeli groups and individuals do. However, their 
efforts are insufficient in light of the looming prospect of a permanent 
occupation and the continuation into the indefinite future of what 
exists today. This is a de facto one-state solution, wherein the State 
of Israel rules over the entirety of Mandatory Palestine and over more 
than 5 million Palestinians, most of whom have no rights at all in the 
polity that takes all the important decisions, the Israeli polity. 
Although the responsibility of Israel in this matter is paramount, the 
efforts of Palestinians and of outsiders have been insufficient as well, 
and we will all be affected by such an outcome, so we all have an urgent 
responsibility to act. More immediately, targeting a civilian population 
of 1.5 million people of the Gaza Strip with hunger, deprivation and 
effective imprisonment, whatever the nature of their leaders, is 
criminal and is a violation of international law, as are all attacks on 
civilian populations, Jewish or Arab - something I have said repeatedly 
in talks here. That people, whether in Tel Aviv, Ramallah, the Arab 
countries, or the capitals of the world, can remain silent while Gazans 
are punished on this scale is beyond belief."
What have you learned from the political-media affair in regard to your 
relations with Obama?
"It proved once again that to be of Palestinian origin and to be 
publicly opposed to the occupation and critical of U.S. policy is 
grounds for public defamation as a 'terrorist.' It attests to the 
survival of McCarthyite tendencies in the U.S. media and politics. It 
also reaffirmed that Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians specifically are 
still the 'other' in American society. A higher percentage of 
Arab-Americans voted for Obama than any other ethnic group besides 
African-Americans, and they voted in record numbers too, I believe, and 
yet they are still pushed aside, almost literally. For instance, two 
Arab-American women in hijab were removed from the camera's gaze at one 
of Obama's rallies during the election. Obama did not visit one mosque 
or Arab community center throughout the entire two-year campaign, and he 
never mentioned Arab- or Muslim-Americans in his speeches. Whatever may 
have been the 'strategic' political reasons for these actions, they show 
the kind of atmosphere we in the U.S. live in.
"This situation is linked to the problematic notion that it is 
acceptable to create a U.S. Middle East policy which caters to Israel - 
and specifically to the Israeli right - and to the concerns of powerful 
forces like the Israel lobby that are allied to the Israeli right, but 
hardly at all to Arab- and Muslim-Americans. Such a policy is based on 
the opinions, 'expertise' and allegiances of Washington insiders who are 
not knowledgeable about all the complex realities of the region, and are 
mainly sensitive to Israeli concerns. Just as an Obama administration 
aspires to reflect the entire country in all its diversity, so should 
its Middle East policy-making reflect a comprehensive set of interests 
and concerns, and not just one narrow range of them."
Do you believe that J-street and Arab-American peaceniks can contain 
AIPAC and Jewish right-wing organizations?
"They appear to have begun to make some headway. They need to convince 
American politicians, Democrats in particular, that where Israel and 
Palestine are concerned, leaders of the main institutions of the 
American Jewish establishment, notably AIPAC, do not represent the views 
of the majority of the American Jewish community. In fact, the hawkish 
views of most of these leaders are far closer to those of the 24 percent 
of that community who voted for McCain than they are to the 76 percent 
who voted for Obama.
"Arab-Americans of course have a long way to go before they have 
significant influence, although this is already beginning on the local 
level in some states. This is still largely a first-generation immigrant 
community, although more and more of the young have been born, brought 
up, and educated in the U.S., and will play a much larger political role 
than their elders. Part of the problem is that the range of opinions 
that is permissible in the United States is far narrower than those 
voiced in politics and the media in Israel, or anywhere else. And the 
general level of ignorance in the U.S. about Middle Eastern realities, 
in part due to the unceasing propaganda bombardment, is higher than any 
place in the world."
As an historian - why did Oslo fail and why does it look like our 
conflict is reaching a final deadlock?
"Oslo was doomed to fail for several reasons. It was never an agreement 
between equals, granting statehood and self-determination to the 
Palestinians, nor was it intended to allow that outcome, Palestinian 
illusions about it notwithstanding. It did not deal with the key issues 
between the two sides - Jerusalem, refugees, land, borders, sovereignty 
and water - and failed to halt settlement or end the occupation. It was 
an agreement that in effect allowed one side to continue eating the pie 
that the two were supposed to negotiate over dividing. Indeed, the 
decade of negotiations that began with Madrid saw a doubling of the 
settler population, the implementation of plans to parcel up the West 
Bank into cantons, and the consecration and strengthening of the 
occupation regime. The 2000 intifada then gave [former Prime Minister 
Ariel] Sharon a chance to accelerate those already ongoing processes.
"There is no such thing as 'final' in history. The current situation is 
inherently unstable, with intolerable pressure being put on the 
Palestinians. This pressure will sooner or later produce a reaction, 
unless it is relieved. The Palestinian national movement is currently in 
eclipse, as has happened before. Who can say what will come next, but 
the past 60 years have shown that Palestinian society, whether the part 
that remained behind in the Jewish state in 1948, or that currently 
under occupation, or that in the diaspora, has shown enormous vitality 
and a remarkable capacity to re-knit itself and resist enormous 
pressure. Look at the Palestinians in Lebanon, who have suffered and 
suffer more than any segment of Palestinian society, except the people 
of Gaza. In spite of the serial atrocities committed against them, the 
multiple external foes they have faced, and the many terrible mistakes 
and failures of the political leadership, like the Gazans they manage to 
maintain their social cohesion in conditions of indescribable difficulty."

 wrote:
va bene non leggere i libri, ma almeno il ng, cazzo..

 va bene non leggere i libri, ma almeno il ng, cazzo..
Tu evita innanzitutto di appiccicare titoli in stile Novella 2000 agli 
articoli e poi tieni presente la semi-contemporaneità degli invii.