What Of The Palestinian People?

There are certain realities in the hundred-year-OLD war THAT IS CURRENTLY being aired on the 24-hour news cycle between Israel and Hamas. First, American politics have, and for the foreseeable future, aligned itself with Israel. Hamas has refused to retract on its founding principles that Israel must be destroyed, and thus have been declared by America and the European Union, to be a terrorist organization. Hamas is the duly-elected representative of the Palestinian people as a result of fair and open elections. Israel and America responded to Hamas' election by imposing a smothering economic boycott of Gaza, that has had a devastating toll on the Palestinian people.

Finally, there have been atrocities committed by both sides that blur the meanings of words such as "terrorist."

President-elect Barack Obama said in Israel this summer, "If someone was raining rockets down on the house that my daughters slept in, I would do everything I could to stop it." Who could not agree with the President-elect on that statement? However, even the Israelis knew that Obama's words were an act of political pandering to the Jewish vote, in a hotly contested Democratic Primary election. It was also a simplistic response to a nuanced set of political realities. Clearly, someone who gave a complex speech on race just a few months earlier, knew that.

The MORE POIGNANT questions for the President-elect are "what if someone built a fence around the south side of Chicago and then imposed an airtight economic boycott of those caged inside?" "What if the people were not allowed to travel outside of that wall, and WERE subjected to what former President Jimmy Carter described as apartheid conditions?" "What if the sole purpose of this economic boycott was to force the elected representatives from power?" "Would the President-Elect simply sit in his living room and watch his daughters world slowly strangled?"

And it must be remembered that the Palestinian people did not turn to Hamas because of its political ideology. The Palestinians had lost faith in the corrupt Palestinian Authority and what they saw as the West's unwillingness to reign in Israel's expansion policies into Palestinian lands through illegal settlements and the building of a security wall –on Palestinian land.

There is no debate that Hamas' adherence to radical Islam is a major impediment to peace. Only despots carry on a war in the name of God. It is unrealistic to expect that the person sitting across the table from you would trust any agreement as long as you openly called for his destruction. Even the Arab governments in the region despise Hamas.

However, the Israelis raining high-tech weaponry down on one of the most densely populated centers on the planet, simply cannot go unchallenged by the moral world. This war was launched as much for internal politics as it was for attacking Hamas.

It has become too exhaustive to assign blame to this mess. What is clear is that the Israelis and the Palestinians cannot resolve this conflict on their own. The United States needs to be honest brokers. No other President has come to power with the goodwill of the world AND THE ABILITY TO force the TWO parties into a meaningful and lasting peace AGREEMENT MORE than Obama. Obama needs to speak to the world with the same moral complexities that he did on race. To the shock of the media, America appreciated HAVING A MATURE DIALOGUE on its original sin. I suspect the world is ready for the same nuanced analysis on the middle-east, too.

To speak of Israeli pain and not mention the pain that Palestinian people have lived with since the formation of Israel, can no longer be this country's policy. The fact is - the people who have suffered the most in THIS mess - are the Palestinians families, who want no more than anyone else –a future for their children. In poll after poll, residents of Gaza support a two state solution with Israel as a peaceful neighbor.

When Barack Obama speaks of this crisis as President, he must speak not only of Israel's security, but also, "what of the Palestinian people?"