A post-election piece for Vox on how Obama could redeem his promise to the Palestinians. Needless to add, perhaps, he failed to do so. Excerpts:
All that survives of Oslo today are those elements that are useful to Israel: The Western-funded administrative and security institutions of the Palestinian Authority that were once intended as a transitional vehicle for a journey towards Palestinian statehood, but today are an integral part of the status quo. The stability of the PA is now based on a combination of repression and the fact that more than one in three West Bank Palestinian households depends on a PA salary.
Israel’s leaders and public are deaf to warnings by US officials and the remnants of the Israeli “peace camp” that the status quo is not tenable, because such warnings don’t jibe with their experience: For Israel, the occupation has no downside. For three quarters of Israel’s lifespan as a nation state, its flag has flown over the territories conquered in 1967.
Israelis are unmoved by the warning that they face a choice between being a Jewish state and a democratic one, or the alarm sounded by the likes of former Prime Ministers Ehud Barakand Ehud Olmert, as well as former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Secretary of State John Kerry that the “apartheid” reality created by the occupation threatens international isolation along the lines suffered by South Africa’s white minority regime in the 1980s. (Kerry later apologized for his word choice, in a classic illustration of the domestic political constraints cited by Obama on the US administration’s ability to speak uncomfortable truths …
… The demand for an even-handed US policy based on human rights and equality is gaining momentum in American public discourse, even if it does not yet influence the Washington policy process. Senator Bernie Sanders broke taboo during the primary campaign by speaking forcefully in support of Palestinian rights and equality, castigating Secretary Clinton for failing to even mention the Palestinians in her address to AIPAC.
Nor will the denial of Palestinian equality be tolerated by the growing movement of Americans of color challenging police violence, fighting for immigration rights or challenging infringements on Native American rights. The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, has wholeheartedly embraced the Palestinian cause, backing the call for economic pressure on Israel to end the occupation and for US policy to do the same. And activists from the Democratic Party’s progressive wing, led by Cornel West, made an impassioned plea for the US to embrace the cause of Palestinian civil rights during the debate over the Democratic Party program last summer, reflecting the sentiments of the party’s progressive wing, whose influence is likely to grow in the wake of Clinton’s defeat…
… Obama’s greatest legacy for achieving peace in the Middle East may lie less in diplomatic parameters, than in helping reverse the imbalance in leverage — by convincing Americans that Palestinian lives matter.