Obama and Palestine: We're easily satisfied

It seems less often than more when published political analysis reflects reality. But I was rewarded for my patience in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books (July 15, 2010) when I  read the following in David Shulman’s article on “Eyeless in Gaza.”

Maintaining the occupation is, of course, incompatible with making peace, and indeed it should be clear by now to all that the present Israeli leadership has no interest in resolving the conflict. Quite the contrary: the ongoing proximity talks with the Palestinian Authority are no more than a diversion. I know of no one in Israel who takes them seriously, least of all the Netanyahu government. Gaza itself provides another helpful distraction. The very idea of peace based on mutuality, compromise, and at least minimal respect for the dignity of the other side is anathema to the men and women in the Cabinet who are making the decisions. [dated June 16, 2010; Shulman is identified as a Professor of Humanities Studies at the Hebrew University]

Perhaps I liked Prof Shulman’s clarity because it was not inconsistent with my own suggestion that Obama's Middle East policy is really Rahm Emanuel's Middle East policy, which has opportunistically stood on the shoulders of the previous Bush-Cheney-Eliot Abrams Middle East "policy."

Bush administration policy was to give free rein to the most right wing elements in their administration to do their worst to the Palestinians. Accordingly they (very cleverly we must admit) engineered the Hamas electoral victory in January 2006. They insisted on going through with the election because they knew Hamas would win. And they also engineered the Hamas takeover of Gaza in June 2007.

[See The Gaza Bombshell Vanity Fair 2008

According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready.]

Thus Washington and Tel Aviv  had a perfect pretext to starve Gaza –NOT into submission -–submission to what? – -- but to starve them in preparation for the next step: expulsion and mass murder whenever  the political situation should be deemed appropriate. The Israelis are in no rush. They know time is on their side. (And their timetable has been speeded up by a decade or more by Bush and now Obama.)

Thus the purpose of Operation Cast Lead of December January 2008-2009 -- which Obama could have stopped. Destroy as much of Gaza’s infrastructure as possible. So the Israeli blockade against building materials going to Gaza makes sense since the Israelis have no intention of allowing what they destroyed to be rebuilt. It’s a plan that couldn’t be implemented without the approval of the Obama administration.

Here as in almost every other critical area, Obama makes a mockery of his theme of change, as by this time, 18 months into his term of office,  he stands exposed as having no independent policy or plan other than to allow and assist Israel to do its worst. Just like Bush-Cheney.

Many are familiar with the Hebrew song, Dayenu, which is traditionally sung on Passover: Dayenu means: it is sufficient for us; we are satisfied: or in the case below:  we would be satisfied.

With a slight twist to the lyrics we might sing to Obama: Dayenu: We understand that you have no intention of lifting the blockade of Gaza. That’s ok. But perhaps you can do something to repair Gaza’s sewage system destroyed in Cast Lead so that the many tons of raw sewage that flow daily into the Mediterranean can instead be treated and the Palestinians and their guests can once again enjoy their beaches. Dayenu.

Obama’s Plan A was to bark loudly about an end to settlement activity, a plan that was intended to fail. So little thought was given to the plan that the U.S. was caught by surprise when the Abbas “Authority” cleverly decided to take it seriously and refused to negotiate with the Israelis until it was implemented.

But it doesn’t matter. The Palestinians can refuse all they want. The surprise is that the White House doesn’t seem to have a face saving Plan B other than to show the white flag of surrender.

Here’s a nice symptom  of the surrender flag from Mondowiess’s invaluable site.

by Adam Horowitz on July 7, 2010

http://mondoweiss.net/

Robert Dreyfuss reports:

Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu set up another illegal Jewish settlement, this time on the White House lawn. And, it appears, President Obama has agreed to serve as its armed guard.

So complete was Obama’s identification with Israel yesterday that he actually referred to Israel as “us” before correcting himself:

“We strongly believe that, given its size, its history, the region that it’s in, and the threats that are leveled against us – against it, that Israel has unique security requirements.”

One often hears things like: Hamas isn't hurt by the blockade since they get plenty of revenue from their taxes on what comes through the tunnels on the Egyptian border. It's the ordinary people of Gaza who are hurt. This of course is true, but surely the U.S. and Israel are aware of what’s going on.

Which goes to show that the blockade isn't intended against Hamas. Like Arafat, Hamas is Israel's friend, giving the government all the pretext they need to impose as much hardship and cruelty and oppression on the Palestinians as they can devise each month.

Yes, the blockade is intended to immiserate the Gazans and the larger Palestinians community. It’s a signal that the Israelis have the power to tell them they don't belong in land which Israel covets and to prepare themselves for  the day when they are to be shown the door.

Ah, if only Hamas would agree to give up Gilad Shalit. Unconditionally. That would show the Israelis that the Palestinians want peace. I actually heard this from a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist on NPR, on a liberal talk show.

The last thing the Israeli government wants is the return of Gilad Shalit –which if they really wanted him back, it could be done in 48 hours. Like Arafat and Hamas, Shalit is a poster boy for Palestinian intransigence. If Shalit were returned, he'd only have to be replaced --probably at the cost of 15 or 20 or 1,000 or more Palestinian lives. 

Glenn Greenwald on Obama's next Supreme Court pick

Friends:

Remember how it was in the bad old days of Bush-Cheney?  They would pile one horror on top of another to the point where when the next one came down, our reaction became: So what's new?

At least in those days we could look forward 2,4, 6, 8 years and comfort ourselves with the thought that at least then we'll have the opportunity to change the direction of our govt.

 

Are we at a similar point now?  We read about Obama's not unlikely next pick for the Supreme Court to replace one of its aging liberal members and we say: So what's new? We're getting inured  to Obama's atrocities just as in the bad old days. But what relief can we look forward to in the next 2,4, 6, 8 years?

***

Glenn Greenwald

 Mar 26, 2010

The horrible prospect of Supreme Court Justice Cass Sunstein

Glenn Greenwald writes:

The N.Y. Times bizarrely claims that choosing this long-time defender of Bush radicalism would "excite the left"....
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/26/court

 

The New York Times' Peter Baker has an article today on Obama's leading candidates to replace Stevens, in which one finds this strange passage:

The president’s base hopes he will name a full-throated champion to counter Justice Antonin Scalia, the most forceful conservative on the bench. . . . The candidates who would most excite the left include the constitutional scholars Harold Hongju Koh, Cass R. Sunstein and Pamela S. Karlan.

While that's probably true of Koh and Karlan, it's absolutely false with regard to Sunstein, who is currently Obama's Chief of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.  From the beginning of the War on Terror, Cass Sunstein turned himself into one of the most reliable Democratic cheerleaders for Bush/Cheney radicalism and their assault on the Constitution and the rule of law. 

 

Here are some of the lowlights of Sunstein's record abstracted from Greenwald's article.

He:

* Defended Bush's military commissions and wrongly predicted that the courts would uphold these commissions [Does this put Sunstein in Clarence Thomas territory?]

*Defended Bush's warrantless wiretapping

*According to the Washington Post,

Sunstein argues that Bush's decision to conduct surveillance of Americans without court approval flowed from Congress's vote to allow an armed struggle against al-Qaeda. "If you can kill them, why can't you spy on them?" Sunstein said, adding that this is a minority view.

 

Read Greenwald's blog

The horrible prospect of Supreme Court Justice Cass Sunstein

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/03/26/court

 

In January 2010, two months before the Supreme Court opening became a news item, Greenwald warned his readers of:

Obama confidant's spine-chilling proposal
Cass Sunstein wants the government to "cognitively infiltrate" anti-government groups
Cass Sunstein wants the government to ... Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, ...
By Glenn Greenwald
Friday, January 15, 2010

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/01/15/sunstein

 

 

 

Unmasking Obama’s Middle East policy

What's going on in Israel U.S. relations? Since Israel’s recent slap in the face of their greatest protector and supporter during VP Biden’s visit, there’s been a lot of noise in the media about the incident's effect on U.S. Israeli relations. But since there’s no visible policy change either in Tel Aviv or in Washington, we can surmise that the brouhaha is simply a distraction from the Obama administration's deeply hostile intentions towards the Palestinians in their struggle for justice and for their human and national rights.

Many Obama supporters had hoped that with the departure of the Bush-Cheney regime there would be some respite from their open malevolence and vicious hostility to the whole Arab and Muslim world. We didn’t expect real justice for the Palestinians, we weren't hoping for miracles. We understood the fealty that that the power of the Zionist lobby imposes on Congress and the White House and that the cause of one person, one vote, a country for all its citizens was not going to be on the agenda.

Nevertheless we had hopes that at the very least, the worst of the previous administration's animus towards all things Palestinian was behind us. But as we approach the first days of spring 2010, we find that behind the latest public drama between the two countries, we are facing the depressing and brutal truth that the Obama administration, with its agenda seemingly set by chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, a committed Zionist, has the same ruthless intentions towards the Palestinians as had the previous U.S. regime.

What's the evidence? In a word: concrete, as in: By their actions ye shall know them. Israel's bloody Operation Cast Lead in December-January 2009-2010 (an operation that could have been headed off or curtailed by President-elect Obama, a point we didn't realize until a year later) was intended and was successful in destroying the best part of Gaza's remaining infrastructure, its schools, hospitals, government buildings, farms, factories, hothouses, much of its housing and on and on. ** It was a brutal, pitiless, more than twenty-day operation against an absolutely helpless and trapped population, which if it happened to Jews, would have been termed the greatest pogrom against them in more than 50 years. But since Jews conducted this attack, it has been accepted as a legitimate defensive action in much of the Western world.

Bad enough, but what about the aftermath? The Gaza community wasn’t asking for much under the circumstances. At the very least they might have expected that the Obama administration do what was necessary to allow them to import concrete and building materials so that they could begin putting something of their lives back together. One can imagine some of the behind- the-scenes pleading by Palestinian representatives and their supporters to the Obama administration: Can’t you at least allow us to rebuild some of the damage?

No, answers back the U.S. We can't. We won't. The U.S. doesn't say that outright, or at least I haven’t heard such a thing. In fact I haven't heard one statement made by a high or not so high U.S. official on the subject, although I'm sure there's a State Department document somewhere to the effect that Israel has every right to defend itself in the ways it sees fit.

No, the only people I've heard on the subject are Israeli spokespeople who most often are unembarrassed to intone: Sorry, we'd love to let you have as much concrete as you want except that we're scared that if you do so, well, who knows what you might do with it? You might use it to cast stones at us if and when we are required to cross the border again with our infantry and our tanks and F-15s.

The effect of U.S./Israeli policy is to ensure that the damage done to the infrastructure of Gaza, which was the apparent point of the Cast Lead operation, is never repaired so as to make it as difficult as possible for the Palestinians to live in their land and to struggle for their rights.

It’s called creeping transfer, creeping expulsion and Obama, led by Rahm Emanuel, has chosen to cast his lot with those who support Israeli policy.
***

**Wikipedia’s entry on the subject documents much of the damage caused by the Cast Lead operation. [Numbers in brackets refer to the footnotes they cite.]

On 27 December Israel began a wave of airstrikes [26] on the Gaza Strip with the stated aim of stopping the rocket attacks from and arms smuggling into the territory,[27][28] damaging or destroying tens of thousands of homes,[29] 15 of Gaza’s 27 hospitals and 43 of its 110 primary health care facilities,[30] 800 water wells,[31] 186 greenhouses,[32] and nearly all of its 10,000 family farms[33]; leaving 50,000 homeless,[34] 400,000-500,000 without running water,[34][35] one million without electricity,[35], and resulting in acute food shortages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_War

***

Note:
Just as I was finishing my latest bout of editing this blog entry, I noticed that Alex Cockburn and my mentor, colleague and friend, Jeffrey Blankfort, had recently weighed in on the same subject. I decided not to read their articles before I posted mine, partly because I was afraid that I’d want to modify my own too long delayed post. --RB

See Alexander Cockburn, March 19 - 21, 2010
"My Fellow Americans, Tonight I'm Going to Talk Frankly About a Pesky Little Nation Called Israel ... " http://counterpunch.org

Jeffrey Blankfort, “A Crisis in U.S. / Israeli Relations? Sure. But ...
Why Israel Always Prevails,” March 19 - 21, 2010
http://counterpunch.org/blankfort03192010.html


Special mention also of recent posts by Dr. Stephen Sniegoski, author of The Transparent Cabal, an important study of neocon influence in promoting the Iraq War, who has been following these issues and shedding much light.

Counterpunch: Top Ten Reasons to Kill the Senate Health Care Bill:Obama and Rahm Cheer Republican Victory in Mass: An End to Reform

Thanks to Alex Cockburn for highlighting the poison below about the Senate Health Care Bill.  As of this writing, how many if any of the insults below will pass in some kind of health care "reform."  But if all of the execrable provisions or some of them pass, wouldn't it be interesting that when the Dems had 60 votes they needed all 60 so that the worst elements could be forced through by a single Senator -- like Lieberman. Now that they don't have 60, will it take only 51 to pass some of the outrages below, and pay off Big Pharma and Big Insurance (redundant), BHO's major contributors?

 

In his lead article for the same issue of CP, "2010: Is The Future Behind Us?" Alex Cockburn refers more than once to the power of Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel in shaping and forcing through the legislation he prefers: anti-abortion for one; and by implication, blocking legislation he opposes. I wonder if people -- besides Marcy Wheeler and Jane Hamsher of firedoglake and emptywheel -- are starting to wake up to who is really the president and who is the empty suit whose words get emptier every week.

 

It's a nice question how upset Rahm and Obama really are by the Massachusetts loss since their goal seems to be to lose the Democratic majority -- perhaps in both Houses, just like Clinton -- so that the pressure --pressure? what pressure? -- for reform will fade into a memory from last year. Their only embarrassment is the public relations blow and this simply gives a chance for Obama  --again and again-- to sound like he's the populist while he plays  the delaying game. Their plan which has worked for them like a charm, seems to be to create the vacuum that will open the door to the lobbyists and the Tea Baggers whose job it is to make plenty of noise -- the less reality-related the better. Their cacophony gives cover to Rahm, as he dispatches marching orders to Reid and Pelosi, ensuring that only his right wing agenda gets through.

***

 

Top Ten Reasons to Kill the Senate Health Care Bill

 

from CounterPunch (hard copy edition) vol. 16, No. 22, Dec. 16-31, 2009

January 4, 2010

CounterPuncher Chuck Spinney sends us this note:

 

I got this from a friend who works on budget issues in Congress. If true, this list would explain why Insurance stock just rose to all time highs.

 

• Forces you to pay up to 8% of your income to private insurance corporations – whether you want to or not.

 

• If you refuse to buy the insurance, you’ll have to pay penalties of up to 2% of your annual income to the IRS.

 

• Many will be forced to buy poor-quality insurance they can’t afford to use, with $11,900 in annual out-of-pocket expenses over and above their annual premiums.

 

• Massive restriction on a wo-man’s right to choose, designed to trigger a challenge to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court.

 

• Paid for by taxes on the middle-class insurance plan you have right now through your employer, causing them to cut back benefits and increase copays.

 

• Many of the taxes to pay for the bill start now, but most Americans won’t see any benefits – like an end to discrimination against those with preexisting conditions – until 2014, when the program begins.

 

• Allows insurance companies to charge people who are older 300% more than others.

 

• Grants monopolies to drug companies that will keep generic versions of expensive biotech drugs from ever coming to market.

 

• No re-importation of prescription drugs, which would save consumers $100 billion over 10 years.

 

• The cost of medical care will continue to rise, and insurance premiums for a family of four will rise an average of $1,000 a year – meaning, in 10 years, your family’s insurance premium will be $10,000 more annually than it is right now.

Diebold and Health Care: Bradblog on Election for Kennedy Seat

Who should we root for in the Tuesday special election for senator in Massachusetts: the Republican or the Democrat?  Do we want to stop the  terrible health care reform bill or do we want a Democrat Senator in Kennedy's old seat? I say we take the Republican for 6 years: a good trade off.

 

Some of the implications of the Bradblog item below.

 

How long now has it been since we've given up hoping that an incoming Obama administration would help do something regarding the computer voting machine fraud (see below)  and move to establish fair elections in this country?  Has it been 6 months already that we've given up hoping for reform from the Emanuel administration.

On that score, it's a testament to Rahm Emanuel effectiveness that we can't get ONE Democrat to vote against the health care monstrosity. He's as powerful as Cheney was apparently when it comes to ensuring that only the legislation he wants, gets passed. That includes further restrictions on abortion, a huge windfall for the insurance industry and big pharma. We can't even roll back the Bush monstrosities on the costs of medications; nor will we have the Canada option we used to have.

 

Interesting or ironic that Emanuel/Obama really don't want a Democratic controlled Congress, certainly not a 60 vote majority in the Senate. On the other hand, they want this health care giveaway bill. Tough call.

Where's Walter Karp when we need him?  He's the one who explained that when Democrats win the White House and/or Congress their big challenge is how to dampen hopes for reform. In Indispensable Enemies (1993) he shows that the last thing the Party wants is an activist base pushing and shoving with reform proposals and competing for power. Republicans have an easier time since their platform is anti-Reform.

But this is Emanuel's time so it looks like one way or another the health care disaster will somehow pass.

***

 

 

Easily Hacked Diebold Machines to Determine Winner of 'Toss-Up' Special Election for U.S. Senate in MA
Written by Nathan Barker and Brad Friedman

 

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7650

 

Since writing today's piece for Upstate New York's right-leaning Gouverneur Times, a new poll has come out this morning showing the Republican Scott Brown now leading the Democrat Martha Coakley by 4 points in
the race for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by a Democrat named Kennedy for nearly 60 years.
As of last night, when I filed the story with them, the latest survey from a Democratic-leaning pollster showed Coakley up by 8, though a day or two earlier, Republican Rasmussen had Brown down only by 2 points.
Suffice to say it's now officially "a toss-up", at least according to the Rothenberg Political Report, and to all
the Dems and Reps now sweating out what was previously thought to have been an easy Democratic win.
With the 60th "filibuster-proof" Senate seat now hanging precariously in the balance, I'm sure you'll be delighted to hear that the winner will now be whoever Diebold declares it to be. The near-entirety of the
state will vote next Tuesday on paper ballots to be counted by Diebold op-scan systems. The same ones used dubiously in the New Hampshire Primary in 2008, and the same ones notoriously hacked --- resulting in a flipped mock election --- in HBO's Emmy-nominated Hacking Democracy.
And to make matters even worse, the notorious LHS Associates --- the private company with the criminal background, who has admitted to illegally tampering with memory cards during elections, and who has a Director of Sales and Marketing who embarrassed himself with obscene comments here at The BRAD BLOG some years ago, resulting in his being barred from CT by their Sec. of State --- sells and services almost all
of MA's voting machines along with those in the rest of New England.
Read my detailed coverage of the entire sad affair over at Gouverneur Times today. And yes, here we go again...

http://www.bradblog.com/?p=7650