Gaza War Weakens U.S. Standing, Pro-Western Arabs

By Massoud A. Derhally

Jan. 13 (Bloomberg) -- Israel’s military operation in the Gaza Strip against Hamas, now in its third week, is weakening the U.S.’s standing in the Middle East and undermining pro- Western leaders in the Arab world, Lebanon’s top diplomat said.

“Israel’s oppressive and barbaric war on the innocent people in Gaza without a doubt weakens the standing of the United States and its role in the region,” Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh said in a telephone interview today from Beirut.

This is a result of “the fact that the policy of President George W. Bush’s administration was not fair and did not address the Palestinian issue, the seminal concern and mother of all the problems in the Middle East,” he added. “It hasn’t given the Palestinians their inalienable rights as required.”

Israel sent troops into the Gaza Strip on Jan. 3 after a week of aerial bombardment that the government says is aimed at stopping militants from firing rockets into southern Israel. At least 919 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict and more than 4,400 wounded, according to emergency services in Gaza. Thirteen Israelis have died, including nine soldiers killed in Gaza.
UN Call

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who travels to the Middle East today, demanded an immediate cease-fire yesterday. “To both sides, I say: Just stop now,” he said at a news conference in New York. “Too many people have died.”

Egyptian and European diplomats are trying to mediate between Israel and Hamas to stop the fighting. Israel, reinforced by newly called-up reservists, pressed ahead with its operation.
With the mounting death toll and the perception in the Arab and wider Muslim world that the U.S. has sanctioned Israel’s continued offensive in Gaza, the “fear is that moderate states could go back to the ranks of nations that are not moderate,” Salloukh said. “The Palestinian issue is central and the new American administration must deal with it from the first day that President-elect Barack Obama takes over.”

Obama has said he won’t address the Gaza issue before taking office on Jan. 20.
Adnan Abu Odeh, a former political adviser to Jordan’s King Abdullah, said Israel was “playing into the hands of the radicals in the region.”

West ‘Weakened’

“The outcome of this entire episode is the weakening of the West,” Odeh said in a telephone interview today. “The West has been the major loser. The United States should atone for its sin of encouraging Israel to continue this attack.”

Protesters have taken to the streets in Jordan, Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon, Yemen, Turkey, and several European capitals over the past two weeks, calling on the international community to pressure Israel to stop its operation.

In Jordan, Egypt and Mauritania, the Arab three countries that have relations with Israel, protesters have called on their governments to sever ties.

“This crisis is widening the fault line between Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas on the one hand, and the moderates led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia on the other,” Yossi Alpher, a former official with Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency and one-time adviser to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, said in an interview today. Israel fought a monthlong war with Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim Hezbollah militia in 2006.

The chasm between Arab governments and disconnect with their public opinion may be influenced by the arrival of a new U.S. president who may take a different approach to foreign policy than his predecessor, Alpher said.

Obama is starting on “the right foot with his willingness” to talk to U.S. enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East “with no emphasis on building democracy by force, and getting out of Iraq,” Alpher said.

“If Israel is smart we will look for way to communicate with Hamas as well.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Massoud A. Derhally in Amman, Jordan, at mderhally@bloomberg.net.

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