Song Only Obama Hears, Vision Only Obama

Mr. Obama is often depicted as a politician who cancommunicate a message of hope to his listeners. But amessage of false hope is destructive and shows adisregard for the suffering of the victims.

By Ira Glunts
PalestineChronicle.com

In an otherwise unremarkable recent speech to members
of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), Senator and Presidential candidate Barack
Obama concluded his talk by making a startling
reference to his brief January 2006 visit to the
village of Fassuta [1] in northern Israel. The Senator
spoke of “the signs of life and hope and promise” he
witnessed there. Toward the end of his speech Mr.
Obama stated,

Peace with security. That is the Israeli people's
overriding wish. It [emphases mine] is what I saw in
the town of Fassouta on the border with Lebanon. There
are 3,000 residents of different faiths and histories.
There is a community center supported by Chicago’s own
Roman Catholic Archdiocese and the Jewish Federation
of Metro Chicago. It is where the education of the
next generation has begun: in a small village, all
faiths and nationalities living together with mutual
respect. [2]

The reality is that the village of Fassuta [3] is not
an integrated community as Senator Obama claims, but
one that is comprised almost solely of Melkite
Christian, Palestinian Arabs. The Melkites, who are
Roman Catholics, are part of a greater Christian Arab
community, who are themselves a minority among
Palestinians living within the pre-1967 Israeli
borders. Of course the vast majority of Arabs in both
the Israel delineated by the pre-1967 borders and the
Israel delineated by the post-1967 borders, are
Muslims.

According to official Israeli government statistics
for 2005, there were no Jewish residents in Fassuta.
In a January 11, 2006 article entitled, “Obama Visits
Remote Israeli Town with Chicago Ties,” Chuck Goudie,
a reporter at the local Chicago ABC television
station, states that “[a]ll 3,000 residents of
Fassouta are Israeli, Palestinian and Catholic.”
(Earlier in the article Goudie incorrectly states that
a majority of Arabs in Israel are Christian.) This
article, amazingly, is posted on Senator Obama’s
official Senate web site [4].

The support that the Catholic Archdiocese and Jewish
Federation have given the villagers of Fassuta is
commendable. It is only appropriate that Mr. Obama
would want to acknowledge the good works of his
constituents. But implying that what he saw there
fourteen months ago is an example of present progress
toward peace in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict when
the region has witnessed so much strife and hardship
subsequent to his visit is disingenuous.

Fassuta, like other Palestinian villages, suffers from
a lack of services and infrastructure as a direct
result of Israeli government policy. According to the
Israeli Central Department of Statistics figures, the
average income in Fassuta is 3748 NIS (New Israeli
shekels) per wage earner as compared with 6835 NIS for
the entire country. The village is rated as average
in a government devised socio-economic scale (5 of a
possible 10). A past resident whose family still
live there told me that he “wouldn't describe Fassuta
as a ‘poor’ village, although the authorities treat it
the way they treat all other Arab villages - with
total neglect and dismissiveness.”

The government of Israel views its Palestinian
population as second class citizens at best, and
officially sanctioned discrimination against its
minority communities is openly acknowledged. To the
vast majority of Palestinians, who are Sunni Muslims,
the small gesture of outside support given to a
Christian village would not be viewed as evidence of
new signs of progress. But it would be a reminder of
the Israeli policy of favoring smaller sectarian
groups over the larger Muslim population, in a policy
known in Israel as “divide and conquer.” This policy
has been most effectively employed with the Druze
community.

In American foreign policy discussions, the above
internal state of affairs tends to go unrecognized.
Sometime this is because we choose to ignore it,
sometimes it is because of lack of knowledge. Often
it is because we focus on what many think is the
greater, more pressing and more soluble problem – the
disposition of territory Israel acquired as a result
of the 1967 War and the possible creation of a
Palestinian state. Obama’s speech conflates both
discussions with equal measures of falsehoods and
flights of fancy.

I would never expect Senator Obama to champion the
cause of the Palestinian citizens of Israel during his
campaign for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
In the current US political climate, if he were to do
so in front of AIPAC, the least of his problems would
be alienating his immediate audience. However, I do
expect a Presidential candidate to not draw completely
irrelevant and erroneous conclusions about what a town
like Fassuta signifies in relation to the “[p]eace
with security… [t]hat is the Israeli people’s
overriding wish.”

I wonder if Obama even knows that some seven months
after his visit, during the last Lebanese/Israeli war,
Fassuta sustained heavy damage from Hezbollah
shelling. I wonder if Obama knows that the Israeli
government does not build bomb shelters in Palestinian
villages, as they do in Jewish settlements. This was
a particularly egregious oversight in Fassuta since
during the last war “Israeli artillery units were
stationed in fields near …[the village]…, from where
they exchanged shell and rocket fire with H[e]zbollah
units.” [5] I wonder if Senator Obama knows that the
residents of Fassuta had to bring the Israeli
government to court in order to receive equal
compensation to that received by those living in
neighboring Jewish towns for damage caused by the
shelling. Although the residents won their case, it is
not clear if they will actually receive compensation
equal to that of their Jewish neighbors. [6]

Fassuta’s two most famous natives are Sabri Jiryis and
Anton Shammas. Jiryis is a founding member of Al-Ard,
a writer, lawyer and political activist. He is a
prominent, long-time member of Fatah, who returned to
Israel in 1994 after 24 years in exile. His classic
1966 book, The Arabs In Israel, was updated and
translated into English in 1976. [7] Jiryis
presently divides his time between Ramallah in the
West Bank and Fassuta. Anton Shammas, wrote the
highly regarded Hebrew autobiographical novel
Arabesques, and has been living in a self-imposed
exile in Ann, Arbor, Michigan where he is a university
professor. Shammas has written about his own
difficulties living as a Palestinian in his native
land. [8] I do not imagine that Mr. Obama knows about
or has met either of these two men, although I
remember reading that Mr. Shammas once lived in
Chicago . Maybe if Obama had spoken to them, he would
not be so quick to point to Fassuta as “[p]roof, that
in the heart of so much peril, there were signs of
life and hope and promise-that the universal song for
peace plays on.”

American politicians are famous for making outrageous
statements which demonstrate that they are totally
unaware of the cultural and political realities in the
foreign nations they visit. It is disappointing that
Mr. Obama could be so deaf to the song that he heard,
since according to Chicago writer and activist Ali
Abunimah, [9] the Senator had attended numerous
Arab-American events when he was an Illinois state
politician. To describe an atypical village in
northern Israel as a sign of hope and promise, and a
kind of paradise of dancing children, is to sing a
tune which will grate on the ears of those who are
familiar with the region.

Mr. Obama is often depicted as a politician who can
communicate a message of hope to his listeners. But a
message of false hope is destructive and shows a
disregard for the suffering of the victims. I do not
know what Mr. Obama wanted to communicate to his
listeners at AIPAC. However, what he communicated to
those who are knowledgeable about the
Palestinian/Israeli conflict is that he is not at this
time prepared to seriously discuss Middle Eastern
policy.

Notes

1. The name of the village is generally
transliterated as “Fassuta,” and alternately “Fasuta,”
or “Fassouta” The latter spelling is used in the
text of Obama’s AIPAC speech and in the cited Goudie
article.
2. The full text of the speech is available at
Senator Obama’s US Senate web site
http://obama.senate.gov/speech/070302-aipac_policy_forum_remarks/index.html
3. Some pictures of Fassuta can be found at:
http://www.pbase.com/pb975/fasuta
4. Goudie, Chuck, “ Obama Visits Remote Israeli
Village With Chicago Ties,” January 11, 2006 .
http://obama.senate.gov/news/060111-obama_visits_remote_israeli_town_with_chicago_ties/index.html
5. de Quetteville, Harry, “Israel Is Accused Of
Racism Over Its War-Payouts,” Telegraph, September
24, 2006 .
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/24/wmid24.xml
6. See above.
7. Ettinger, Yair, “The PLO Is His Life’s Work,”
Ha’aretz, November 17, 2004 .
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=502532
Also see Wikipedia entry for “Jiryis, Sabri.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabri_Jiryis
8. See Kahlil Sakakini Cultural Centre web site entry
for “Shammas, Anton.”
http://www.sakakini.org/literature/anton.htm
9. Abunimah, Ali, “How Barack Obama Learned To Loved
Israel ,” March 4, 2007.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6619.shtml

-Ira Glunts first visited the Middle East in 1972,
where he taught English and physical education in a
small rural community in Israel. He was a volunteer
in the Israeli Defense Forces in 1992. Mr. Glunts
lives in Madison, New York where he writes and
operates a used and rare book business. He can be
contacted at gluntsi@morrisville.edu