The Middle East peace process took a serious blow when George Mitchell resigned on Friday as Obama's special envoy after two frustrating years. Mitchell played a major role in getting the centuries-old Irish question resolved but hit a wall in the Middle East. (No pun intended.) Obama claims that Mitchell had planned to stay in the position for two years. Considering how little was accomplished due to Israeli intransigence and Palestinian turmoil, Mitchell may be resigning in frustration rather than for a time schedule.
Obama plans a speech Thursday. It will be interesting to see where that one goes. Israel will listen to calls for compromise from no one, apparently not even the United States now. An atmosphere in which a united Palestinian approach is considered a "complication" does not bode well. Will Obama cave to the Israel lobby (which does not speak for many American Jews (e.g. Americans for Peace Now) or for the many Israeli peace activists) or will he take a more balanced stance and a personal, but politically risky, role to achieve a just peace for both sides? The right-wing cabal in control of Israeli politics does not seem to understand that true peace and security will only come when justice is obtained for both sides. And American politicians are too intent on winning the next election to do anything that can realistically achieve such a peace and so they blind themselves to what is one of the major causes of anti-American feeling in the region.
It will be especially interesting now that Arab demonstrators are calling on Israel to stop its oppression of the Palestinians in the annual protests against the "nakba" or "catastrophe" – the term they use to describe their defeat and displacement (read "ethnic cleansing") in the war that followed Israel's founding on May 15, 1948. If the United States supported the rights of Arabs in the protests against their own governments, how can they NOT support protests against an occupier that continuously oppresses an entire population?
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