The public media duly reports the speeches of Barack Obama, including ones to Arabs and Muslims. Typical of Obama’s rhetoric regarding the Palestine issue is to sternly lecture the Israelis on the need to cease the building of new outposts and settlements on Palestinian land.
If the Jewish people treated the Nazis that way, Simon Wiesenthal would have urged former Nazi officers to resign their commissions in the German Army, not go to prison for war crimes. Elie Wiesel would pray for the dead, not demand reparations from Swiss Banks.
No, Barack Obama is insulting the Palestinian people and insulting peace and justice advocates by making such puny demands.
Israel has stolen massive amounts of Palestinian land since 1967, removed Palestinian agriculture and water resources, built infrastructure including an apartheid wall on Palestinian land, not Israeli land.
Israel has committed crimes against humanity routinely and with impunity, and has dwarfed the Palestinian "terror" response with their own brutality and violence.
Instead of calling for a cessation of construction of new outposts, Barack Obama should be demanding a total withdrawal of Israeli citizens and military from Palestinian lands to the 1967 borders, leaving Israeli "improvements" intact for the use of the Palestinian people as they see fit.
Israelis should be forced to pay massive reparations to the Palestinian people, and should pay in cash for Palestinians to dismantle the apartheid wall using Palestinian labor at Israeli (and U.S.) expense.
If the Israelis sought justice in the abstract instead of justice for their own sufferings, they would deal with Palestinians as victims. They would see that the Jewish Holocaust couldn’t be legitimately used as a pretext for a land grab against the Palestinian people or for exercise of power against Palestinians resisting the illegal land grab.
President Barack Obama does not serve the cause of justice by calls for pathetic half measures.
Israel is in the position of power and can initiate a healing by acknowledging its role in bringing harm and instability to the region. Israel has inflicted hugely disproportionate pain to the pain it is suffered from Palestinian resistance.
Israel holds the key to peace and justice in the region. Barack Obama should focus on the Israeli moral obligations and not primarily on Israeli security, which itself is a victim of Israeli violence and injustice.
