February 15, 2008

Rosy Expectations

In the fashionable salons of Lahore, and in the plush offices of Islamabad officialdom, there is this shortcut notion that if Israel is embraced, then, in return, the pro-Israel Lobby in Washington would start working overtime to lobby for Desi elites.
Naïve and over-simplistic though it may appear, this is the perception which persists in some influential quarters. It partially explains the clandestine flirtation of various factions with Israel. 
Rosy expectations sometimes crash against the rocks of reality. 
In fact, the present administration is constantly being slammed in the US by the very elements which it had sought to appease so assiduously. 
The paramount interest of the pro-Israel Lobby is Israel first, and Israel alone. The vital interests of the US don’t even come close. To imagine that someone somehow would come into the frame merely because of being “moderate” and “nice” is the height of self-delusion and self-denial. 
Israel itself is hobbled by serious internal problems. On January 30, 2008, her government-appointed panel of inquiry led by Eliyahu Winograd, a respected jurist, to investigate Israel’s failure to vanquish Hezbollah during the 34-day Israel-initiated war in Lebanon of July/August 2006, has reached devastating findings on Israeli ineptness and leadership deficiencies. It concluded that “a semi-military organization of a few thousand men resisted for a few weeks the strongest army in the Middle East.” The setback, the inquiry report stated, was the result of “flawed performance by the Israeli military, especially the ground forces”. Many observers view that Israel suffered psychological defeat at the hands of Hezbollah. 
At the same time, the London-based premier human rights organization, Amnesty International, called the Winograd Commission’s report “deeply flawed” for failing to review Israeli policies that did not distinguish between combatants and the civilian populace and that, according to an Amnesty official, did not address “the grave violations of international humanitarian law – including war crimes – committed by Israeli forces.”
In the US, the Presidential campaign has picked up momentum, with candidates debating issues spanning the economy, immigration, health care, terrorism, and Iraq. However, notwithstanding the inhumane blockade at Gaza, thus far not a single candidate has had the guts to mention – let alone debate and discuss –the core Palestine-Israel dispute which has now metastasized into a global spread. 
The climate of extreme intolerance on this issue has not spared even an icon of non-violence. Especially instructive has been the fate of Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, who until recently was president of the board of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence at the University of Rochester. Arun had written that, overly reliant on weapons and bombs, Israel is part of a “Culture of Violence” that “is eventually going to destroy humanity.” In the uproar that followed, Gandhi apologized for his remarks and resigned his position. The president of the University of Rochester termed Gandhi’s resignation “appropriate”, commenting that Gandhi’s views are “fundamentally inconsistent with the core values” of the school.
But all is not doom and gloom. Ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani had shamelessly marketed the fear and hatred of Muslims in post-9/11 America, capitalizing on fears, according to a new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, felt by many Americans who suffered psychological and physical consequences after 9/11 that they could become victims were there another terrorist attack on US soil. Giuliani’s exploitive message was soundly rejected by the American public, and he consequently has been wiped out as a Presidential candidate. 
The irony of fate – as demonstrated through the election results of 24 states holding Presidential nominating events on February 5 – is that the man who symbolizes the hope of a new change of direction, in post-9/11 America, carries the name Hussein, as in Barack Hussein Obama.