skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Labels:
Fareed Zakaria»
Rashid Khalidi
You will recall that during the election campaign, the Los Angeles Times had but did not release a video of Khalidi's going away party from Chicago, which was attended by Barack Obama, at which some extremely anti-Israel statements were made.
the segment about Israel with Khalidi and Stephens starts around the 11:00 mark and ends around the 27:15 mark.
Ron Radosh notes the part that is most problematic.
During the discussion, Zakaria asked whether or not it was “a shift for the — the United States to be suggesting that this stalled peace process [between Israel and the Palestinians] hurts America’s ability to pursue its interests.” What the administration is now saying, Khalidi responded, “is that Israel is a drag on the United States. It’s not a strategic asset, and this is a discursive shift of some significance.” (my emphasis) To put it a bit differently, Rashid Khalidi, who in 2008 worried that because of American politics Obama had to appear to be a supporter of Israel, now believes that Obama’s promise to move U.S. policy towards the Palestinian perspective is coming true.
Khalidi again emphasized his main point: “that Israel is not the strategic asset it was touted as during the Cold War” and that the U.S. had returned “…in effect, to the Eisenhower administration’s view of the Middle East as an area where the United States has problems, and Israel is, in some small way, one of those problems.” Clearly, all the boilerplate assurances coming from the Obama camp in the past few weeks — assuring Americans that the U.S. commitment to Israel as a major ally is as firm as ever — have not dissuaded Khalidi from reaching a quite different conclusion.
