Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Like Gershom Gorenberg and a lot of other people, I was disturbed by Obama’s pandering to AIPAC–no matter how his advisors have tried to “clarify” his remarks. But when you compare Obama’s views on foreign policy in general with McCain’s, the sensible choice is obvious.

Undivided Jerusalem, South Jerusalem: Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Watzman, June 2008

An adviser to the Obama campaign has responded to my criticism of O’s statement to Aipac, “Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.” The adviser, remaining anonymous, says that that the candidate really means physically undivided: Obama “has said before that Jerusalem is a final status issue to be negotiated by the parties, but that two principles that should guide any outcome is that it will remain Israel’s capital and it should never be redivided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was from 1948-67.” I’m satisfied with that as a position. I still think it was disingenuous and damaging to use the formulation he used before Aipac. The audience - in the hall, and around the world - heard “undivided Jerusalem” in the way that official Israel constantly uses the phrase, meaning politically undivided. That was red meat for the Aipac crowd. Saying “physically undivided” would have been a red flag. Afterward, Obama had to clarify, or backtrack, or write a midrash on his own words, in order to maintain his dedication to effective diplomacy. Better not to have raised the issue. But then, Obama was talking to a crowd inclined to believe both Pinocchio Pipes and the frontier fallacy. He faced the classic dilemma of a high school kid at the wrong party - being yourself and being popular just don’t fit together.

Rory McCarthy talks to Ahmad Abu Me’tiq, who lost his wife and four of his children in an Israeli air strike, The Guardian, May 14, 2008

Her bed is on the third floor of Gaza’s Shifa hospital, where shafts of warm afternoon sunshine reach in from the window. The ward is crowded, and the bed on which Asma’a Abu Me’tiq lay is curtained off from the rest and surrounded by the blankets her sister-in-law uses when she sleeps on the floor next to her at night.

It may be the best hospital in Gaza but even the poorest families, like the Abu Me’tiqs, must provide extra food themselves. Asma’a’s father, Ahmad, returns from downstairs with a cheap electric hot-plate, which he bought on credit from a shopkeeper he knows. He plugs it into the wall to heat a pot of thin homemade soup for his 13-year-old daughter, but there is either no electricity or the hot-plate didn’t work. “What bad luck,” he says quietly to himself.

Then he reaches over to his daughter, who is coughing and struggling to breathe from the deep wound in her chest. She hasn’t touched her food since she was rushed to hospital 10 days earlier: the day an explosion in the street outside demolished the metal front door of their house as the family were eating breakfast, impaling her and her younger sister, Shaima, seven, with shrapnel and killing outright four other brothers and sisters and her mother too.