CNI President talks with State Department about Peace Process

On the day after Obama’s speech in Egypt I was one of some fifty or sixty people invited to participate in a State Department teleconference to discuss the speech. Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley conducted the discussion on behalf of the DoS. The majority of participants expressed gratitude for Obama’s speech but had important questions about how the intended rapprochement and lofty objectives would be implemented.

Eugene Bird, the head of the Council for the National Interest, pointed out that a letter sent by Ahmed Yousef, Hamas’s Deputy Foreign Minister, to the President via the American Embassy in Egypt offering to move forward on the basis of “mutual respect and adherence to international law.” Bird suggested that this seemed to constitute compliance with Obama’s demand of recognition of Israel and the other particulars Obama had placed on inclusion of Hamas in the peace dialog. Ms. Ambercrombie-Winstanley’s response was that she had not seen the letter.

I asked two questions of special importance. (1) What were the concrete steps that Obama intended to follow to advance the peace process, and if the administration did not wish to announce specifics yet, when would specifics be announced? (2) Given that the failure of previous peace negotiations to openly deal with the Palestinians’ right of return had doomed peace process to date, would that right be placed on the table for discussion now?

Ms. Ambercrombie-Winstanley’s response to the first question was that President Obama has made it clear that he would not discuss specifics now and there was no timeline. Her answer to the second question was that this was something to be worked out between the Palestinians and the Israelis. I objected that it was not. It was a matter of international law, and if international law is not the business of the international community, then what is? Ms. Ambercrombie-Winstanley’s response was that, nonetheless, the subject is not on the table.

There was a participant who was not enamored of the tone of the President’s speech. He objected to what he perceived as a suggestion of moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, because, as he put it, Hamas has killed hundreds of people and attacked even State Dept. personnel. Ms. Ambercrombie-Winstanley’s response was that the administration made no moral equivalency between Hamas and Israel. She took no note of the fact that the questioner had it backwards, for the questioner was oblivious to Israel’s murder of thousands, including Americans like Rachel Corrie, its imprisonment of tens of thousands of political prisoners over the decades or its unprovoked and intentional bombing of the U.S.S. Liberty. This very week the surviving crew members again come to Washington, DC to vainly protest the cover-up that excused the Israeli aggression against their fallen comrades as some sort of mistake.

The answers to these four questions were disappointing. We continue to take hope in the fact that at least the administration heard the questions. After his speech Mr. Obama went on to visit Buchenwald and to convey to the survivors of the Holocaust his sympathy. We continue wait to see what actions may be motivated by any sympathy he may have for the survivors of the Gaza massacres, the survivors of attack on the Liberty, and the family of Rachel Corrie.

Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, Ph.D.
Minaret of Freedom Institute