The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine by Nathan Thrall

Author:Nathan Thrall [Thrall, Nathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2017-05-15T19:00:00+00:00

13.

Obama’s Palestine Legacy

In no American president did Palestinians invest higher hopes than Barack Obama, and in none did they come to feel more profound disappointment. Obama entered the White House more deeply informed about and supportive of the Palestinian cause than any incoming president before him. He had attended and spoken at numerous events organized by the Arab American and Palestinian American communities, in which he had numerous contacts, and he had repeatedly criticized American policy, calling for a more even-handed approach toward Israel.1

In a 2003 toast to Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian American historian of the University of Chicago and later Columbia University, Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi’s wife, Mona, and the many talks that had been “consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.” He had dined with and attended lectures by such figures as Edward Said, the most famous and eloquent Palestinian critic of the Oslo Accords, and he had offered words of encouragement to Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian American activist, writer, cofounder of the Electronic Intifada, and leading advocate of a one-state solution.2

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that Palestinians looked to Obama as a potentially historic figure capable of ending their occupation. For the first time, they had the prospect of an American president who was not only sympathetic to their plight and motivated to resolve it but could connect to it viscerally. Obama could draw parallels with Britain’s colonization of Kenya, where his Muslim father was born, and the African American struggle for civil rights that had culminated in his presidency. Palestinians recalled that in 2007, during the previous administration, Condoleezza Rice had said that Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian life and movement were similar to the oppressive conditions that had angered her as a black child in racially segregated Alabama. Now the Palestinians had a black United States president who had cast himself as a champion of civil rights and replaced George W. Bush’s Oval Office bust of Winston Churchill with one of Martin Luther King, Jr.3

In his first days on the job, Obama did not disappoint. Within hours of taking office, he made one of his first phone calls to a foreign leader, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “We were not expecting such a quick call from President Obama,” a pleased Abbas adviser said, “but we knew how serious he is about the Palestinian problem.”4 Obama and his inner circle shared a strong conviction that a two-state agreement could be reached, and that a new approach was necessary for them to be the ones to reach it.

On his second day, Obama appointed a special envoy for Middle East Peace, Senator George Mitchell, author of a 2001 fact-finding report that called for a freeze in Israeli settlement construction. Four months later, ahead of a White House visit by Abbas, the administration publicly confronted Israel with a call for a complete freeze in settlement building in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and said that in discussing settlements it

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