Guardian UK: Forget the myth-making. Obama is just what the Middle East needs

[marmar]

Forget the myth-making. Obama is just what the Middle East needs
Neither Israel-pandering hawk nor Arab-loving appeaser, the Democrat would bring active, engaged diplomacy


Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian, Wednesday July 23, 2008


It's lucky Barack Obama has people to carry his bags these days, because when he arrived in Israel last night he brought with him a whole lot of baggage. Most of it was packed with negative associations that owe more to urban myth than reality, but that combined to make the Democratic candidate an object of suspicion from the earliest days of his campaign, first among American Jews and then in Israel. The mix of facts, lies and hybrids of the two is now wearily familiar: Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim; he was educated in a madrasa; he has terrorist friends; his former pastor is an Israel-hater and admirer of the anti-Jewish Louis Farrakhan; he was against the war on Iraq, wants to talk to Iran - and will therefore fall to his knees to appease Israel's enemies.

The Obama camp has worked hard to dump all this cargo, but it has been stubborn to shift. Opinion polls show that US Jewry's traditional three-to-one backing for the Democrats remains intact, with most supporting Obama. But while the Illinois senator can look forward to a euphoric response in Berlin tomorrow night, and in London and Paris thereafter, Israel is one of the few places where he faces a hostile, or at least uncertain, public. Recent polls have Israelis backing John McCain over Obama, just as they preferred Hillary Clinton a few months back.

The people answering those surveys may well have made up their minds some 18 months ago, when the novice senator told a handful of Iowa voters that "No one is suffering more than the Palestinians". That single line crystallised the view that Obama, who had once dined with the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, would be chilly to Israel were he ever to reach the White House.

The result is that the Israel-Palestine leg of Obama's current world tour will be the trickiest, placing him under the closest scrutiny. He will be watched not only by Israelis and Arabs in the region, but by their cheerleaders back home in the US, looking for any misstep, any sign of a new tilt towards one side or the other.

Not that friends of the Palestinians have high hopes for true evenhandedness. They have seen the way Obama has sought to dismantle that earlier image of himself by swearing his granite support for Israel. With some ingenuity, he even recast the soundbite that had got him in such trouble, declaring: "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel." ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/23/barackobama.middleeast