The “Yes, We Can” Slogan Stranded In Obama’s Myriad of Vows
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14738/assrj.210.1510Keywords:
Obama, Netanyahu, Palestine, Settlements, United Nations, Quartet, changeAbstract
At the beginning of his presidency in January 2009, President Obama not only made an effort to mobilize the Middle East to support his bid for “change”, but he also mobilized the English language to achieve his purpose; and for the first time, we heard pledges to break the U.S.-Israel “kabuki dance”[i]. With his vows to adopt a different posture, President Obama changed George W. Bush’s tone and rhetoric towards the Muslim world, and promised to commit the United States to bring about an end to the 60-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He initially condemned Israeli settlements, the major obstacle to peace for decades now, as “illegal”, and set their “complete freeze” as a prerequisite to resuming peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis. It did, after all, seem to the Palestinians too good to be true that the settlements had to stop before the peace process would get back on track.
Near the end of Obama’s second term now, Obama’s slogan of “yes, we can” in the Middle East has been stranded in his procrastination whether to confront Israel’s right wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Consequently, change has become more and more elusive, and the prospects of peace in the region are in shambles. President Obama gradually backed away from his condemnation of Israel’s settlements policy in the Palestinian territories. Obama’s failure to make good on his words with respect to the peace process became gradually clear in his three U.N. General Assembly talks from 2009 to 2011 which this work takes as case studies. The tone and the verbiage of these three speeches revealed that Obama’s 2009 promises of change would most likely fail to materialize, and the initial euphoria of Obama’s vows of resetting the button of the US foreign policy in the Middle East was incrementally dampened with each of Obama’s U.N. General Assembly speeches. In the end, all that changed for the Palestinian-Israeli peace process are the tone and the rhetoric rather than the reality of things on the ground. With at least two bloody wars have been fought in Gaza in October 2012 and July 2014, and when war crimes were committed[1], the situation has even deteriorated and the prospects of peace have become more and more elusive since Obama took office in January 2009.
[1] "Israel: In-Depth Look at Gaza School Attacks". Human Rights Watch. 11 September 2014. Three Israeli attacks that damaged Gaza schools housing displaced people caused numerous civilian casualties
[i] “Obama Aping Bush on Mideast peace”, The Opinions, September 7, 2010.
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