A
Song Only Obama Hears,
A Vision Only Obama Sees
By Ira Glunts
17 March, 2007
Countercurrents.org
In an otherwise unremarkable
recent speech (for
full text click here) to members of the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Senator and Presidential candidate
Barack Obama concluded his talk by making a startling reference to his
brief January 2006 visit to the village of Fassuta [1] in northern Israel.
The Senator spoke of “the signs of life and hope and promise”
he witnessed there. Toward the end of his speech Mr. Obama stated,
Peace with security.
That is the Israeli people's overriding wish. It [emphases mine] is
what I saw in the town of Fassouta on the border with Lebanon. There
are 3,000 residents of different faiths and histories. There is a community
center supported by Chicago’s own Roman Catholic Archdiocese and
the Jewish Federation of Metro Chicago. It is where the education of
the next generation has begun: in a small village, all faiths and nationalities
living together with mutual respect.
[2]
The reality is that the village
of Fassuta [3] is not an integrated community as Senator
Obama claims, but one that is comprised almost solely of Melkite Christian,
Palestinian Arabs. The Melkites, who are Roman Catholics, are part of
a greater Christian Arab community, who are themselves a minority among
Palestinians living within the pre-1967 Israeli borders. Of course the
vast majority of Arabs in both the Israel delineated by the pre-1967
borders and the Israel delineated by the post-1967 borders, are Muslims.
According to official Israeli
government statistics for 2005, there were no Jewish residents in Fassuta.
In a January 11, 2006 article entitled, “Obama Visits Remote Israeli
Town with Chicago Ties,” Chuck Goudie, a reporter at the local
Chicago ABC television station, states that “[a]ll 3,000 residents
of Fassouta are Israeli, Palestinian and Catholic.” (Earlier in
the article Goudie incorrectly states that a majority of Arabs in Israel
are Christian.) This article, amazingly, is posted on Senator
Obama’s official Senate web site [4].
The support that the Catholic
Archdiocese and Jewish Federation have given the villagers of Fassuta
is commendable. It is only appropriate that Mr. Obama would want to
acknowledge the good works of his constituents. But implying that what
he saw there fourteen months ago is an example of present progress toward
peace in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict when the region has witnessed
so much strife and hardship subsequent to his visit is disingenuous.
Fassuta, like other Palestinian
villages, suffers from a lack of services and infrastructure as a direct
result of Israeli government policy. According to the Israeli Central
Department of Statistics figures, the average income in Fassuta is 3748
NIS (New Israeli shekels) per wage earner as compared with 6835 NIS
for the entire country. The village is rated as average in a government
devised socio-economic scale (5 of a possible 10). A past resident whose
family still live there told me that he “wouldn't describe Fassuta
as a ‘poor’ village, although the authorities treat it the
way they treat all other Arab villages - with total neglect and dismissiveness.”
The government of Israel
views its Palestinian population as second class citizens at best, and
officially sanctioned discrimination against its minority communities
is openly acknowledged. To the vast majority of Palestinians, who are
Sunni Muslims, the small gesture of outside support given to a Christian
village would not be viewed as evidence of new signs of progress. But
it would be a reminder of the Israeli policy of favoring smaller sectarian
groups over the larger Muslim population, in a policy known in Israel
as “divide and conquer.” This policy has been most effectively
employed with the Druze community.
In American foreign policy
discussions, the above internal state of affairs tends to go unrecognized.
Sometime this is because we choose to ignore it, sometimes it is because
of lack of knowledge. Often it is because we focus on what many think
is the greater, more pressing and more soluble problem – the disposition
of territory Israel acquired as a result of the 1967 War and the possible
creation of a Palestinian state. Obama’s speech conflates both
discussions with equal measures of falsehoods and flights of fancy.
I would never expect Senator
Obama to champion the cause of the Palestinian citizens of Israel during
his campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination. In the current
US political climate, if he were to do so in front of AIPAC, the least
of his problems would be alienating his immediate audience. However,
I do expect a Presidential candidate to not draw completely irrelevant
and erroneous conclusions about what a town like Fassuta signifies in
relation to the “[p]eace with security… [t]hat is the Israeli
people’s overriding wish.”
I wonder if Obama even knows
that some seven months after his visit, during the last Lebanese/Israeli
war, Fassuta sustained heavy damage from Hezbollah shelling. I wonder
if Obama knows that the Israeli government does not build bomb shelters
in Palestinian villages, as they do in Jewish settlements. This was
a particularly egregious oversight in Fassuta since during the last
war “Israeli artillery units were stationed in fields near …[the
village]…, from where they exchanged shell and rocket fire with
H[e]zbollah units.” [5]
I wonder if Senator Obama knows that the residents of Fassuta had to
bring the Israeli government to court in order to receive equal compensation
to that received by those living in neighboring Jewish towns for damage
caused by the shelling. Although the residents won their case, it is
not clear if they will actually receive compensation equal to that of
their Jewish neighbors. [6]
Fassuta’s two most
famous natives are Sabri
Jiryis and Anton
Shammas. Jiryis is a founding member of Al-Ard, a writer,
lawyer and political activist. He is a prominent, long-time member of
Fatah, who returned to Israel in 1994 after 24 years in exile. His classic
1966 book, The Arabs In Israel, was updated and translated into English
in 1976. [7] Jiryis
presently divides his time between Ramallah in the West
Bank and Fassuta. Anton Shammas, wrote the highly regarded Hebrew autobiographical
novel Arabesques, and has been living in a self-imposed exile in Ann,
Arbor, Michigan where he is a university professor. Shammas has written
about his own difficulties living as a Palestinian in his native land.
[8] I do not imagine that Mr. Obama knows about or has met either of
these two men, although I remember reading that Mr. Shammas once lived
in Chicago. Maybe if Obama had spoken to them, he would not be so quick
to point to Fassuta as “[p]roof, that in the heart of so much
peril, there were signs of life and hope and promise-that the universal
song for peace plays on.”
American politicians are
famous for making outrageous statements which demonstrate that they
are totally unaware of the cultural and political realities in the foreign
nations they visit. It is disappointing that Mr. Obama could be so deaf
to the song that he heard, since according to Chicago writer and activist
Ali
Abunimah, [9] the Senator had attended numerous Arab-American
events when he was an Illinois state politician. To describe an atypical
village in northern Israel as a sign of hope and promise, and a kind
of paradise of dancing children, is to sing a tune which will grate
on the ears of those who are familiar with the region.
Mr. Obama is often depicted
as a politician who can communicate a message of hope to his listeners.
But a message of false hope is destructive and shows a disregard for
the suffering of the victims. I do not know what Mr. Obama wanted to
communicate to his listeners at AIPAC. However, what he communicated
to those who are knowledgeable about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict
is that he is not at this time prepared to seriously discuss Middle
Eastern policy.
Notes
1. The name of the village is generally transliterated as “Fassuta,”
and alternately “Fasuta,” or “Fassouta” The
latter spelling is used in the text of Obama’s AIPAC speech and
in the cited Goudie article.
2. The full text of the speech is available at Senator Obama’s
US Senate web site
http://obama.senate.gov/speech/070302-
aipac_policy_forum_remarks/index.html
3. Some pictures of Fassuta
can be found at:
http://www.pbase.com/pb975/fasuta
4. Goudie, Chuck, “Obama Visits Remote Israeli Village With Chicago
Ties,” January 11, 2006.
http://obama.senate.gov/news/060111-obama_visits_
remote_israeli_town_with_chicago_ties/index.html
5. de Quetteville, Harry,
“Israel Is Accused Of Racism Over Its War-Payouts,” Telegraph,
September 24, 2006.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.
jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/24/wmid24.xml
6. See above.
7. Ettinger, Yair, “The
PLO Is His Life’s Work,” Ha’aretz, November 17, 2004.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/
ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=502532
Also see Wikipedia entry
for “Jiryis, Sabri.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabri_Jiryis
8. See Kahlil Sakakini Cultural Centre web site entry for “Shammas,
Anton.”
http://www.sakakini.org/literature/anton.htm
9. Abunimah, Ali, “How
Barack Obama Learned To Loved Israel,” March 4, 2007.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6619.shtml
Ira Glunts first visited the Middle East in 1972, where
he taught English and physical education in a small rural community
in Israel. He was a volunteer in the Israeli Defense Forces in 1992.
Mr. Glunts lives in Madison , New York where he writes and operates
a used and rare book business. He can be contacted at gluntsi[at]morrisville[dot]edu.