After Arafat 13
These mugs, showing Obama dressed in Arafat’s signature headgear, are on sale in Gaza.
On May 19, 2011, President Obama made a speech that condemned Israel to extinction by declaring its borders should be more or less the 1948 armistice lines, within which Israel was highly vulnerable. These he called the “1967 lines” – meaning the lines as on June 4, 1967, just before Israel was attacked by Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Israel defended itself, won by hard fighting, and established more defensible “borders”. Its offers of negotiation were refused by the Arab aggressors. For Israel to go back to the 1948 lines could be suicidal.
Obama demanded nothing from the Palestinians: no recognition of Israel’s right to exist; no stopping of rocket attacks, suicide bombing, or their constant and intense propaganda of hate and genocide.
He sided with the Palestinians. In their eyes, he has inherited the mantle – or rather, the keffiyeh of Arafat, famously shaped as the “State of Palestine” he hoped to see on the map.
