What the election won’t change

By Max J. Castro

To the memory of Alexander Cockburn

MIAMI – As I write these lines, there are less than 36 hours before Americans cast their ballots in one of the most momentous presidential elections in recent memory. Since I don’t have a crystal ball, I decline to predict who will win. Suffice it to say that anyone who has read this column over the last year knows I think Barack Obama is a far better choice than Mitt Romney.

Or, perhaps more accurately, I think that a President Romney – anti-immigrant, contemptuous of the most vulnerable 47 percent of the population, reliable advocate for his class, the richest .01 percent, a deadly threat to hard-earned women’s rights, opponent of full equality for gays, dangerous dilettante in foreign policy, serial liar, and more chameleonic than an iguana, animal abuser – would be far worse than a President Obama.

I make the distinction because although I think who won Tuesday will make a real difference, that’s only because Romney and Congressional Republicans are far more extreme than any viable political party in recent memory, if not in American history.
Yet, whether Obama or Romney get to sit in the White House the next four years, the systemic, fundamental transformation that Obama’s 2008 mantra of change seemed to promise won’t happen, either at home or abroad.

Of all the parameters that absolutely aren’t subject to change, none has become more deeply embedded in the DNA of American politics than the United States’ singular, bipartisan and scandalously one-sided policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Regardless of party or president, there is virtually no outrage that Israel can perpetrate – from the destruction of a good portion of Lebanon to the massacre of Turkish civilians by Israeli commandos – that the United States will not effectively support by wielding its veto at the UN Security Council, either by blocking outright any resolution condemning Israel or watering it down to insignificance.

In this regard, the spectacle of Condoleezza Rice, emerging from an all-night meeting with European leaders, the single but effective holdout against a resolution calling for an immediate cease fire in Lebanon, stalling for more time for the Israelis to wreak further havoc on a bleeding country that traditionally had been a U.S. ally, is etched in memory, speaks volumes.

So does the pathetic efforts by both presidential candidates in this campaign to paint themselves as more unconditionally and undyingly pro-Israel than the other. The normal level of political pandering pales. To speak plainly, it’s kissing ass. And it’s a uniquely American phenomenon. Nothing approaching this happens in any other country, including the rich, democratic allies of the United States.

But, here, woe onto the American president who dares lay the lightest of feathers on the Prime Minister of America’s most expensive client state, as Obama found out after his famous though only mildly confrontational meeting with Netanyahu. How dare the president of a nation that gives another a gift of $3 or $4 billion a year fail to bow and scrape before the leader of the beneficiary of such largesse! Obama’s message to Netanyahu was way short of audacity but the president has been trying to live it down ever since.

As it turns out, after the election but before the month is out, the U.S. will have another chance to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel against the overwhelming majority of the nations of the world, the 193 countries that make up the UN General Assembly.

Frustrated at the intransigence of the Israeli government, fed up with a fictitious and endless “peace process” that gives the Israeli the image of reasonableness vis-à-vis the Palestinians while buying the them more time to steal more Palestinian land and water and build new settlements, the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas is spearheading an effort to get the UN to upgrade Palestine’s standing at the world body from observer to “nonmember state.”         

Both the United States and Israel already are working hard to torpedo the initiative. Why, when Israel and the United States both loudly proclaim they favor a Palestinian state, do their actions consistently speak to the contrary?

For its part, Israel is continuously carrying out actions that make a self-respecting, viable, sovereign Palestinian state impossible. By threatening Abbas with withholding economic aid to the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority if he persists with his UN effort, the United States is marching lock-step with Israel in saying whatever Palestinian state is created, if any, it will be under Israel’s terms.

Why? What the Palestinians ultimately seek is to gain some diplomatic leverage and international solidarity in order to force the Israelis to give back the land Israel has taken, illegally under international law, since 1967. The Israeli government says it won’t return to the pre-1967 borders and instead says the borders should be established in direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

It sounds good—in theory. But it is a deeply cynical proposal. Israel is the region’s superpower and it can count with the assured support of the global superpower. Alone, the Palestinians have zero bargaining power. What negotiations could these possibly be? These would be negotiations between a Siberian tiger and a tree squirrel. Moreover, the Israelis, by continuing to expand the settlements while sporadically offering to negotiate with the Palestinians as part of a supposed peace process, successive Israeli governments are constantly and consciously fatally undermining any possibility of serious negotiations. As someone put it, the Israelis want to bargain with the Palestinians about how to split a pizza even as they are eating piece after piece.

By colluding with the Israelis to deny the Palestinians through coercion the modicum of dignity that upgraded status at the UN would confer and the modest increase in diplomatic leverage it could bring, the United States is making a mockery of the idea it could possibly serve as an honest broker in the conflict.

More ominous still, this country and Israel are destroying the last shreds of legitimacy that moderates like Abbas have left. Then the U.S. wonders why Hamas won the election. Somewhere, the leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad are watching developments with amusement.