Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/02/israelandthepalestinians-barackobama
But as more than 2,400 Palestinians have been killed or injured – the majority civilians – since Israel began its savage bombardment of Gaza on 27 December, Obama has maintained his silence. "There is only one president at a time," his spokesmen tell the media. This convenient excuse has not applied, say, to Obama's detailed interventions on the economy, or his condemnation of the "coordinated attacks on innocent civilians" in Mumbai in November.
The Mumbai attacks were a clear-cut case of innocent people being slaughtered. The situation in the Middle East however is seen as more "complicated" and so polite opinion accepts Obama's silence not as the approval for Israel's actions that it certainly is, but as responsible statesmanship.
It ought not to be difficult to condemn Israel's murder of civilians and bombing of civilian infrastructure including hundreds of private homes, universities, schools, mosques, civil police stations and ministries, and the building housing the only freely-elected Arab parliament.
It ought not to be risky or disruptive to US foreign policy to say that Israel has an unconditional obligation under the Fourth Geneva Convention to lift its lethal, months-old blockade preventing adequate food, fuel, surgical supplies, medications and other basic necessities from reaching Gaza.
But in the looking-glass world of American politics, Israel, with its powerful first-world army, is the victim, and Gaza – the besieged and blockaded home to 1.5 million immiserated people, half of them children and eighty percent refugees – is the aggressor against whom no cruelty is apparently too extreme.
While feigning restraint, Obama has telegraphed where he really stands; senior adviser David Axelrod told CBS on 28 December that Obama understood Israel's urge to "respond" to attacks on its citizens. Axelrod claimed that "this situation has become even more complicated in the last couple of days and weeks as Hamas began its shelling [and] Israel responded".
The truce Hamas had meticulously upheld was shattered when Israel attacked Gaza, killing six Palestinians, as The Guardian itself reported on 5 November. A blatant disregard for the facts, it seems, will not leave the White House with George Bush on 20 January.
Axelrod also recalled Obama's visit to Israel last July when he ignored Palestinians and visited the Israeli town of Sderot. There, Obama declared: "If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."
This should not surprise anyone. Despite pervasive wishful thinking that Obama would abandon America's pro-Israel bias, his approach has been almost indistinguishable from the Bush administration's (as I showed in a longer analysis.
Along with Tony Blair and George Bush, Obama staunchly supported Israel's war against Lebanon in July-August 2006, where it used cluster bombs on civilian areas, killing more than 1,000 people.
Obama's comments in Sderot echoed what he said in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby, AIPAC, in March 2007. He recalled an earlier visit to the Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona near the border with Lebanon which he said reminded him of an American suburb. There, he could imagine the sounds of Israeli children at "joyful play just like my own daughters". He saw a home the Israelis told him was damaged by a Hizbullah rocket (no one had been hurt in the incident).
Obama has identified his daughters repeatedly with Israeli children, while never having uttered a word about the thousands – thousands – of Palestinian and Lebanese children killed and permanently maimed by Israeli attacks just since 2006. This allegedly post-racial president appears fully invested in the racist worldview that considers Arab lives to be worth less than those of Israelis and in which Arabs are always "terrorists".
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