Obama, J Street, and Middle East peace
– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own –
Message to Israelis disgruntled with President Barack Obama’s Middle East policies: you’ve got used to U.S. presidents pouring affection on you. Forget that. Obama is not “a lovey-dovey kind of guy”.
That assessment came from an old Middle East hand, former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, in an exchange in the closing minutes of the inaugural national conference of J Street, a new pro-Israel lobby for the liberal majority of American Jews (78 percent voted for Obama) who do not feel represented by traditional pro-Israel advocacy groups, chief of them the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The conference, in the words of J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami, marked “the birth of a movement, a coming-out party for those who want to widen the tent and are not stuck in the mindset that because we are pro-Israel, we must be anti- somebody else”.
Now director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, Indyk was on a panel entitled “Why Two States? Why Now?” He responded to a question from the audience on the advisability of American presidents getting personally involved in Middle East peace-making. They shouldn’t get involved in procedural detail, he said, but for Obama it would be “really important” to go to Israel. Why?
His approval rating, according to Israeli polls, hovers around five percent, a sharp contrast to the 88 percent drawn by George W. Bush, a man thoroughly disliked almost everywhere else. The majority of Israelis think Obama is pro-Palestinian and see his visits to Egypt and Saudi Arabia as evidence that he wants to distance himself from Israel and curry favour with the Arabs. Unless he can dispel that public perception, the Israeli government is unlikely to make concessions.
Without major concessions, both from the Israelis and the Palestinians, there is no chance that Obama will succeed where other American presidents have failed. As far as concessions from Israel are concerned, J Street expects to help the Obama administration convince Congress that questioning Israeli policies is not tantamount to being anti-Israel.
I follow a simple definition for ‘terrorist’.
A terrorist is a person who directs an attack at civilian targets, with the intention to kill civilians. Or who fights in civilian areas, with the intention that any attack against them will also kill civilians.
An attack directed at a military target in a civilian area is not terrorism. Nor is attacking a contested city held by terrorists. Because the only reason a civilian area is involved is because of the choices of the terrorist. The military attack in that area is one of necessity.
This is the only definition which can be legitimate.
The alternative definition is that terrorists can launch attacks from civilian areas at will and hide in civilian areas at will. And nations would be bound by the laws of war not to respond to such actions. A situation which you will agree is simply not viable.
Plus, I fail to see where you can constantly see the issue of religion in this situation. The issue is simply one of nationality. The religion and racism issues came later, generally as frustration with the situation grew.