HIJAB: Freedom from Fear June 26, 2009
by Nadia Hijab
Agence Global
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is but one element in two important and starkly different speeches delivered in the Middle East this month — by Barack Obama in Egypt on June 4, and by Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, June 14.
The real story is bigger than that. It’s about the beginning of freedom from fear. To understand the stakes, it helps to remember that the Israeli prime minister was an early fellow traveler of the American neoconservatives.
In 1996 Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and other neocons laid out, in a strategy paper for Netanyahu, the intellectual foundations for the policies that shaped the Bush years.
At that time, Netanyahu had just become prime minister. The strategy paper, “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” called on him to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime so as to contain Syria, and take on Hizbullah in Lebanon.
The neocons also said that Netanyahu should abandon the “land for peace” formula and, instead, seek “peace for peace.” That is, Israel should keep the territory it occupied while seeking economic relations with its neighbors — and while cracking down on the Palestinians.
Netanyahu drew on the neocon agenda in his speech to the United States Congress soon afterwards. But he added, even then, Iran, which he said constituted the most dangerous regime of all.z
The rest is history. As Craig Unger wrote in Vanity Fair, “A Clean Break” turned out to be nothing less than a “playbook for U.S.-Israeli foreign policy during the Bush-Cheney era.”
There are many echoes from “A Clean Break” in the speech Netanyahu delivered this Sunday. In the very first moments he insisted that the “Iranian threat looms large” confronting not just Israel but the entire world. He then spent a good part of the speech talking about “economic peace” with the Arab world.
He forced out the words “Palestinian state” but was at pains to explain that territorial withdrawals had not brought peace with the Palestinians. And in any case, Palestinians were just a population that somehow happened to be living within the land of Israel.
Some have noted the symbolism of Netanyahu making the speech at Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center in Tel Aviv. But there is another aspect to Bar-Ilan: The largest of its five colleges is located in the settlement of Ariel in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. No wonder the settlers cheered.
On Sunday, Netanyahu remained faithful to the neocon playbook. By contrast, the Obama administration is playing a very different game as it edges the United States away from the consequences of the fear that gripped the country in the wake of September 11 — and that was used as a pretext to visit many 9/11s on the peoples of the Middle East.
Some, myself included, found Obama’s Cairo University speech long on rhetoric but short on policy. Still, when it comes to dealing with fear, rhetoric may equal substance.
I was in Manhattan on 9/11. My father said with great sorrow, when he visited me after people felt safe enough to move around the city again, “It will be centuries before America can even begin to relate to the Arabs as human beings.”
I wish he were still alive to hear Obama and the powerful messages he has given to America, just eight, albeit bloody, years later.
To paraphrase: It’s OK to have an Arab and Muslim name; your president has one. Arabs and Muslims have legitimate rights and grievances, which Americans should note. America does not have to be at war with the world, or reshape the planet in its image. We don’t need bad guys — we can work with countries that disagree with us.
More than anything else, Obama’s Cairo speech represented a break with the neocons’ imperial ideology.
And there’s the rub for the Israeli right. It has thrived on, and contributed to, the clash of civilizations, Islamo-fascism, and terrorism discourse. It has nurtured alliances and grown its economy by exporting many of its population control methods, perfected on Palestinians, as well as its security systems.
A world at war provides the most effective cloak for Israel’s colonization project and maintains its momentum unchecked. This is the fearful world the Obama administration seeks to leave behind.
It is too soon to breathe a sigh of relief. There is still much heavy lifting to be done on many fronts, including securing justice for the Palestinian people, lifting the United States military footprint from the Middle East, and a full restoration of civil liberties in the United States, among others.
But this June, we may have been witness to the beginning of the end of the politics of fear.
Nadia Hijab is Senior Fellow at the DC-based Institute for Palestine Studies. Hijab has also been a prolific writer, authoring over 100 academic articles on a variety of subjects. In 1988, her first book Womanpower: The Arab Debate on Women at Work was published by Cambridge University Press, and was followed in 1990 by Citizens Apart: A Portrait of Palestinians in Israel, published by I.B. Tauris.
LINK: http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=2033
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