The speech, scheduled for Thursday, June 4, will precede both. On that day the US president will give his long-awaited speech to appeal to the Muslim world. This speech and the following two elections have the potential to change the face of the Middle East in particular and East-West relations in general forever.The Muslim world is already fed up with talk. President Barack Obama has a promising tone, but he has to deliver, too, in order to convince the Muslim street. The fact that Obama is speaking in Egypt and not in Pakistan suggests that the American administration is switching its foreign policy priority from Afghanistan back to the Arab Middle East. The president's meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and his clear cut messages to the Israeli government about a halt to any settlement activity is evidence to the fact that Obama is already infected with the “Presidents' Disease.”
Presidents' Disease is an incurable obsession with the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. President Jimmy Carter was the first to become infected and his success in achieving the Camp David Accords of 1979 made it a benchmark of being a “successful US president.” From then on, the Israeli and Palestinian peace lover has awaited the next president to come and breathe new life into an already dead peace process.
President Obama has yet to work his magic. On Thursday he will probably disclose a new initiative to bring Israeli and Palestinian leaders together. The harsh measures the Fatah-led Palestinian security forces took against the Hamas militia in the West Bank last week suggest that President Mahmoud Abbas is clearing his way for this new initiative. A few settlement activities were stopped on the part of Israel. This one was interpreted as yet another Israeli maneuver aiming to soften the language President Obama may have intended to use.
Obama's intention to find a solution to the five-decade-old occupation problem is admirable, indeed, but previous experience shows that switching the priority of policies from the periphery to the center does have a similar effect on the language used. In Afghanistan and Iraq the US rhetoric revolves around “building a democratic, modern and developed nation” whereas any speech that refers to the State of Israel and its right to exist as an equal and respected member of the family of nations pulls the paradigm to that of “fighting with terrorism.” If in his Thursday speech President Obama asks for the cooperation of Muslim and Arab regimes in order to fight terrorism, the administration will stick itself into the same stalemate earlier US administrations were stuck in. If, on the other hand, the president manages to maintain his tone and ask the Muslim nations to cooperate in establishing strong, stable and open democracies in the region and leave a wonderful future to our children, be they Afghan, Pakistani, Indian, Persian or Palestinian, his call will find receptive ears in the Muslim world.
Whether the US president can resist the pull of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle will be defined by the assessments of the US and Israeli scholars of the forthcoming Lebanese and Iranian elections.
The Lebanese election is going to bring the opposition to power. The opposition is a coalition that is mentally ruled by Hezbullah, although it is not the largest party in this coalition. If on June 7 the Lebanese electorate votes for the opposition and drags Hezbullah into a position to challenge the Western world, it is possible that we will see the earlier “unfortunate fate of Hamas” movie once again. Hezbullah is doing its best in order to prevent a “Hamasization” after the elections. But the decision on whether the world should isolate a Hezbullah-dominated coalition government in Lebanon or not is that of Israel and the US. The results of the elections will not only influence the fate of Lebanon and Palestine, they will most probably have a dramatic impact on the Iranian elections of June 12.
Obama will be speaking in Egypt, but his super-addressee will be Hezbullah in Lebanon and the people of Iran. I hope he won't forget to speak about Pakistan altogether and I hope that his words about Pakistan, if they ever come to pass, won't dwell on the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and its security, but on the peace and security of human beings.
