The two speeches of Barack Obama

During his speech today at the State Department, President Obama rightfully noted the “hypocrisy of the Iranian regime, which says it stands for the rights of protesters abroad, yet suppresses its people at home.”

But President Obama’s bifurcated speech—the greater part of which centered on the human rights of people throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the lesser part of which re-trod perfunctorily on the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” — points to an additional double standard that the United States must overcome if it is to have a coherent response to the Arab Spring.

The United States cannot continue to decry violent repression by governments against individuals acting to assert their fundamental human rights while continuing to provide Israel with the means—both weapons and diplomatic support — to continue its human rights abuses of Palestinians without mocking the values it claims to support universally.

President Obama asserted that “we will stand against attempts to single it [Israel] out for criticism in international forums.” Yet, by erasing Palestinians from the Arab Spring and trying to shoehorn Palestinian rights into a moribund and morally bankrupt “peace process” that, under the monopoly of U.S. brokerage, perpetually sublimates Palestinian desires for freedom, justice, and equality to Israel’s “security interests,” it is the President who singles out Israel for special treatment.

By placing Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, and Palestinian efforts to undo those discriminatory policies through nonviolent struggle, outside the context of the changes buffeting repressive regimes throughout the region, President Obama signals that Israel need not abide by the standards to which the United States holds regimes like Libya and Bahrain.

In the President’s view, “We support a set of universal rights. Those rights include free speech; the freedom of peaceful assembly; freedom of religion; equality for men and women under the rule of law; and the right to choose your own leaders – whether you live in Baghdad or Damascus; Sanaa or Tehran.”  But if you live in Gaza City, or Ramallah, or in the Palestinian refugee camps of Yarmouk in Syria, or Ein Al-Hilweh in Lebanon, then you need not apply apparently.

In his address to the Muslim world two years ago in Cairo, President Obama chastised Palestinians that they “must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed.”  Yet, to this day, President Obama continues to overlook that Palestinians have preponderantly utilized nonviolent protest.

Events of the past week have demonstrated that even when Palestinians engage in the forms of popular, nonviolent protest championed by President Obama, they will still be met with Israeli brutality.  And that Israeli repression will not only be tolerated by the United States, but underwritten by it as well.

Last Sunday, to commemorate the 63rd anniversary of the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” as Palestinians term the dispossession inflicted upon them by Israel in 1948, thousands of Palestinian refugees marched unarmed to assert their internationally-recognized, but long-denied, fundamental human right to return to their homes.

Israeli troops killed at least a dozen of these refugees, shooting them with live ammunition, providing a stark reminder of the extent to which Israel will go to maintain its apartheid policies toward Palestinian refugees and deny them their fundamental human rights.

President Obama only referred to the plight of Palestinian refugees as a “wrenching and emotional” issue, not one that should be resolved by compelling Israel to follow international law.  Yet, even for Palestinians living under Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, for whom the President showed a degree of empathy in acknowledging their “suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own,” the illegitimacy of Israel’s repression of their basic human rights never enters Obama’s lexicon.

Recently, Israel finally released from prison Abdallah Abu Rahmah, who was jailed for nearly one and a half years “for the crime of organizing peaceful demonstrations against the illegal construction of Israel’s wall on lands belonging to my village – Bil’in.”  The State Department was asked repeatedly about its position on his jailing, and refused to condemn it, mocking President Obama’s demand of Syria to “release political prisoners and stop unjust arrests.”

By lecturing Palestinians that “efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state,” President Obama evoked the supposedly sympathetic white pastors who counseled caution to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  In his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” King wrote that the worst stumbling block to freedom’s advance is the person who “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s [or woman’s] freedom.”

Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip have been denied their freedom from Israeli military occupation since 1967. Since 1948, Palestinian citizens of Israel have been denied equality, and Palestinian refugees have been denied justice.

Rather than relegate Palestinian rights to the background of an empty “peace process,” President Obama must take the “moment of opportunity” afforded by the Arab Spring to assert that Israel, like every other regime in the region, must respect the humanity, dignity, and rights of the peoples of the region.

Josh Ruebner is the national advocacy director of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition of more than 350 organizations working to change U.S. policy toward Israel/Palestine. He is a former analyst in Middle East Affairs at Congressional Research Service.