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While writing the previous post on Iran strategy, I came across this article from The Middle East Times reporting on Arab reaction to OBama's speech at AIPAC:
AMMAN -- Palestinian and Arab hopes were dashed by a speech that U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama gave to a pro-Israeli lobby, in which he promised his full support to Israel and went further by adopting Israeli policy that sees Jerusalem as the "undivided capital" of the Jewish state.After having discreetly vouched for Obama since the party race to the White House began last year, his speech – just hours after he won his party's backing on Wednesday – has prompted second thoughts about what changes the African-American could bring to Washington's Middle East foreign policy.Millions of Arabs were able to watch the address to the powerful American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which was aired live on some Arab television networks, serving as a "rude awakening" that the United States, regardless of its leadership, would continue to favor Israel at the expense of Palestinian and Arab rights.[...]Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Obama's Jerusalem statement was "totally rejected. The whole world knows that East Jerusalem, holy Jerusalem, was occupied in 1967 and we will not accept a Palestinian state without having [East] Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state."Abbas' aide and senior peace negotiator Saeb Erekat responded by saying that Obama "has closed all doors to peace."The future of Jerusalem is one of the tough final status issues being negotiated between the Palestinians and Israelis, and the occupation and annexation of the eastern part have not been recognized by the international community, including the United States.Domestically, it's easy enough for those of us with the secret decoder ring -- or who assume we have the secret decoder ring -- to write the weirder flourishes of the AIPAC speech off as election year pandering. Few, for instance, really think that Obama will insist on an undivided Jersualem, given that that would mean there's no hope of a peace process, and that would require Obama to be far more hardline than the Israeli government. But the rest of the world doesn't apply quite the same filter, and when the Arab world hears a speech like that, they write us off as honest brokers and judge us hopelessly biased against them. That's not good for us, the Palestinians, or for Israel.
