Change this

While he did everything to pander to Israel, Obama will face the same problems US policy has always faced as a result of Israeli intransigence, writes Ayman El-Amir*

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The stormy US presidential election is now over and a plethora of domestic issues and international challenges are already staring the president-elect in the face. Soon the transition team will be assembled and the process of debriefing the outgoing administration of George W Bush will start. What the transition team will learn about the Bush years will be more harrowing than the worst of Halloween pranks. Of the many things it will conclude is that "change" -- the hallmark of the Barack Obama campaign -- will have to be converted from slogan to policy. It is not only the pressing demand of the American electorate, but is also an urgent priority issue for many people in many regions of the world. One such region is the Middle East at large and one such issue is the intractable Arab-Israeli conflict.

For almost 60 years the Arab Middle East has been stuck in the vortex of transition from colonial rule and backwardness to the dreamscape of the modern nation-state. The transformation has been arrested by adventurous military coups nicknamed "revolutions", ossified monarchies that own and rule nations and resources, and pseudo-republican oligarchs who are sworn to perpetuate themselves in power "until death do us part". From Egypt to Syria, from Tunisia to Algeria, constitutions have been amended to assure sitting presidents uninterrupted continuity. In Arab republics, people's adulation for their presidents is so overpowering that generations of 27-29 year-old adults have known nothing, read nothing, heard nothing and seen nothing but the achievements and caring policies -- or otherwise -- of the one and only leader who is fondly returned to power by the political faithful once every five or six years.

Barack Obama's call for "change" is alien to the lexicon of Arab regimes. They prefer "reform" which they can play on for decades while the masses continue to mire in poverty, disease, poor education, economic and political marginalisation and unemployment. Their paid apologists, whether in the media or in civil and political institutions, tirelessly sing the praises of the vision and deftness of the inspired leader no matter what the people think as they unwittingly return him to power time and again. It is as bizarre as returning George W Bush to the US presidency for a third term. The Gulf Arab states are a modest exception to the prevailing rule because of the glut of oil money, not because of a different outlook. In addition, tribal loyalty and affiliation play a fundamental role in election to representative office.

In their long, turbulent quest for a transition to the modern world, Arab regimes have tried different formulas. Revolutionary change has alienated some, socialism has divided ranks, nationalism provided more rhetoric than reality, and free market economy has only catapulted a few regime loyalists from rags to riches and impoverished the greater majority of the people. Decades of failed political and economic experimentation, coupled with brutal police regime tactics, have spawned religious fundamentalism as the ideology of salvation. As controlling autocracies could not afford the luxury of Western-style free and fair elections or entertain the concept of the rotation of power, the new ideology and the associated jihadist strategies should be a grave concern to Washington in the long run.

In the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration flirted with the idea that democracy was the most effective antidote to terrorism. If people should be free to elect and dismiss their governments by the ballot box, terrorism would have no place in a free society. That was the worst nightmare for entrenched Arab rulers who feared that the insane administration in Washington would go about "reforming" the Arab world, country by country, the same way it did in Iraq or, at least, by brandishing such policy. Washington eventually abandoned the idea, first by watering down the Greater Middle East Initiative, and later by realising that its varied interests in the region, including air, sea and land transit routes to Iraq, were more important than inculcating a culture of democracy in lands where hundreds of millions of people who were denied their God-given choice between democracy and autocracy did not seem to mind. More importantly, the Arab main street did not trust or accept that the Bush administration, which embraced their worst oppressors, massacred Iraq and supported Israeli occupation, could offer them democracy on a silver platter.

If Arab regimes are incorrigible the new administration in Washington should not despair. Should change become a fundamental political principle it may well be built into its Middle East policy.

For the past 50 years, the Middle East Arab-Israeli conflict has been the backwater of US foreign policy, except in times of crisis or war. It became intractable because Israel wanted it to be. The security of the state of Israel has been one of the cornerstones of US policy. Israel alone had the prerogative of defining that security. It included, above all, continued territorial expansion, denial of fundamental Palestinian rights under international law, imposition of an apartheid regime on the Palestinians in the occupied territories, and US-supported military supremacy to guarantee it all. US policy has been predicated on Arab weaknesses and strength. It had ample room to play on the former and little reason to worry about the latter. And, following the October 1973 War, Arab autocrats left the US and Israel no reason to believe that they are capable of embarking on anything more serious than pompous diplomatic manoeuvres in a blind alley. Therefore, the problem has usually been relegated to the last few months of the second term of every US president, when conventional wisdom dictating that the president should not risk alienating the Jewish vote in his bid for a second term no longer held sway. The one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter was an exception that was never repeated.

When in presidential campaigns all candidates pander to the Jewish lobby, Barack Obama was no exception. His speech to the all-powerful American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in June could not have been better written by anyone outside AIPAC staff itself. The speech provided every possible assurance the American Jewish community wanted to hear. In July, Obama visited Israel at the behest of AIPAC. His visit included a stop at the house of Pinhas Amar, a settler in the town of Siderot, whose kitchen had been damaged by a primitive Katyusha rocket fired by Palestinian fighters from Gaza. Senator John McCain had already visited the same house in March, and Senator Obama's campaign managers could not afford to have him overridden by McCain. Obama could not -- or his Israeli hosts would not have allowed him to -- visit, say, the family of Mohamed Al-Durra, the 12-year-old Palestinian child who was shot dead by Israeli soldiers in 2000 as he huddled by the side of his crouching father who took shelter behind a concrete cylinder during an exchange of fire with Palestinian resistance fighters in the Gaza Strip. Nor, for that matter, could he have paid his respects to one of the thousands of families of Palestinians who were killed by Israeli troops in protest demonstrations or fighting to liberate their occupied land. A visit of solidarity with one of the hundreds of Palestinian families whose houses were bulldozed by the Israeli army to provide land for settlers would have been out of the question. None of the above would have been politically kosher.

That is why the Arab mainstream was as indifferent to the candidacy of Barack Obama as it was to that of John McCain.

If change is to be the seal on US Middle East policy, the Obama administration will have to face the dual challenge of smug Arab autocracies and stubborn Israeli policies. The new administration will have to debunk the myth that Israeli military supremacy is the best guarantee of US interests. On the contrary, Israeli military occupation is the lethal trigger of anti-Americanism in the region. The combination of domestic political suppression and rabid Israeli aggression has nurtured the rise and spread of terrorism in the Middle East region and beyond. The US president will have to break the paradigm of securing peace for Israel on occupied Arab and Palestinian territories. He will have to impress on Arab dictators, in the strongest terms, that they cannot count on US support unless they demonstrate, beyond all devious tactics, full respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for their citizens, including the right to choose and dismiss their governments and their presidents. If he is looking for a reliable lesson, Barack Obama needs only to re-examine the 100-year- long US involvement in South America and where it led.

The Bush administration was foolish enough to believe that an alliance of "moderates" who do not rock the boat of American policy, and confrontation with Iran, is in the best interest of the US. Time will prove this belief woefully wrong.

* The writer is former Al-Ahram correspondent in Washington, DC. He also served as director of United Nations Radio and Television in New York.