" Obama, Zionism And West Bank Occupation"

Is there anything new a presidential candidate can say about the absence of peace in the fragile Middle East?

Anything beyond a promise to work at it hard?

Barack Obama is not offering a sure-to-work formula to bring Israel and its Arab neighbors together.

The Democratic candidate for president is speaking of the security needs of Israel and the economic hardships of the Palestinians.

But the bottom line is, and will always be, it is up to the parties and not the American president to make peace.

"It's unrealistic to expect that a U.S. president alone can suddenly snap his fingers and bring about peace in this region," Obama said.

If the Jewish vote, assuming there is such a thing, weren't valued especially in what could be a tight race, Obama might have left it at that. His Republican opponent, John McCain, isn't offering anything new yet. He appears to be relying on stating clearly his commitment to Israel and its security.

At least to some observers, Obama appeared to be saying something new in a speech last month to pro-Israel lobbyists at a dinner in Washington.

He spoke in one breath of Jerusalem remaining undivided and Israel's capital.

It turned out, though, that he wasn't exactly saying all of Jerusalem should be Israel's capital.

The Palestinians want at least the part of the city Israeli troops captured from Jordan in the 1967 Mideast war, and Obama was not ruling out that possibility.

If the Illinois senator is signaling a change it is his promise to be active from the get-go, insinuating that President Bush sat on his hands too long and opportunities may have been lost.

"What I think can change is the ability of the United States government and a United States president to be actively engaged with the peace process," Obama said.

It is debatable whether a sleeves-rolled-up Bush could have been any more successful than Bill Clinton was in playing a direct role in trying to drive Israel and the Palestinians and Israel and Syria into peace agreements.

On the other hand, President Jimmy Carter kept Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin from quitting the Camp David talks in 1978 and drove them to a treaty the next year.

At this point, Iran appears to be overtaking peacemaking as the primary topic in the region.

"Iran has become the biggest issue for Israelis," said David Makovsky, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "It is making peacemaking harder with its support for rejectionist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah and that will be a daunting challenge for any president."

And Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. negotiator, in a separate interview said "reassuring the Palestinians and the world that he is going to take the Arab-Israeli conflict seriously" is important.

And Miller, author of "A Much Too Promised Land" added that assuring the pro-Israeli community of his commitment to Israel's security is important as well.

However, Miller said, the more important reassurance is that "while Obama may engage the Iranians he is irrevocably committed to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons."

Zionism is an international political movement that originally supported the reestablishment of a homeland for the Jewish People in Palestine (Hebrew: Eretz Yisra'el, “the Land of Israel”), and continues primarily as support for the modern state of Israel.

Although its origins are earlier, the movement was formally established by the Austro-Hungarian journalist Theodor Herzl in the late 19th century. The movement was eventually successful in establishing Israel in 1948, as the world's first and only modern Jewish State. Described as a "diaspora nationalism," its proponents regard it as a national liberation movement whose aim is the self-determination of the Jewish people.

While Zionism is based in part upon religious tradition linking the Jewish people to the Land of Israel, where the concept of Jewish nationhood first evolved somewhere between 1200 BCE and the late Second Temple era (i.e. up to 70 CE), the modern movement was mainly secular, beginning largely as a response by European Jewry to antisemitism across Europe. It constituted a branch of the broader phenomenon of modern nationalism. At first one of several Jewish political movements offering alternative responses to the position of Jews in Europe, Zionism gradually gained more support, and after the Holocaust became the dominant Jewish political movement.

After WWII and the Holocaust, support for Zionism increased, especially among Jewish Holocaust survivors. The British were attacked in Palestine by Zionist groups because of their restrictions on Jewish immigration, the best known attack being the 1946 King David Hotel bombing. Unable to resolve the conflict, the British referred the issue to the newly created United Nations.

In 1947, the UNSCOP recommended the partition of western Palestine into a Jewish state, an Arab state and a UN-controlled territory (Corpus separatum) around Jerusalem. This partition plan was adopted on November 29th, 1947 with UN GA Resolution 181, 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions. The vote itself, which required a two-third majority, was a very dramatic affair and led to celebrations in the streets of Jewish cities.

The Arab states rejected the UN decision, demanding a single state with an Arab majority. violence immediately exploded in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. On 14 May 1948, at the end of the British mandate, the Jewish Agency, led by Ben-Gurion declared the creation of the State of Israel and the same day, the armies of four Arab countries invaded Israel.

During the following eight months, Israel forces defended the Jewish partition and conquered portions of the Arab partition, enlarging its portion to 78 percent of mandatory Palestine. The conflict led to an exodus of about 711,000 Arab Palestinians , of whom about 46.000 were internally displaced persons in Israel. The war ended with the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which included new cease-fire lines, the so-called Green line.

After the war the Arabs continued to reject Israel's right to exist and demanded that it retreat to the 1947 partition lines. They sustained this demand until 1967 when the rest of western Palestine was conquered by Israel during the Six-Day War, after which Arab states demanded that Israel retreat to the 1949 cease fire line, the only "borders" currently recognized by the international community. These borders are commonly referred as the "pre-1967 borders" or the "green line".

There have been a number of critics of Zionism, including Jewish anti-Zionists, pro-Palestinian activists, academics, and politicians. The Arab League and Arab Higher Committee rejected the UN Partition Plan (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181) approving the creation of a Jewish and Arab state in Palestine, and some of the most vocal critics of Zionism have been Arabs, many of whom view Israel as occupying Arab land. Such critics generally opposed Israel's creation in 1948, and continue to criticize the Zionist movement which underlies it. These critics view the changes in demographic balance which accompanied the creation of Israel, including the displacement of some 700,000 Arab refugees, and the accompanying violence, as negative but inevitable consequences of Zionism and the concept of a Jewish State.

Map Of Israeli Occupation Of The West Bank

tags: israel  zionism  west bank  palestinians  gaza  iran  barack obama  obama  middle east  war  warpeace  neoconservatives  zionists  

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