Obama wins or McCain wins will make no difference to the Arabs

It is a popular belief among Americans that the Arabs prefer Barack Obama because his first name is derived from the Arabic “Baraka” and his middle name is Hussein. That may have been the case before Mr Obama came out so vocally in favour of Israel.

Mr Obama’s statements and actions during the past six months have made it amply clear: it is not going to make the slightest difference to Arab welfare or the cause of the Palestinians struggling for their rights and freedom if Mr Obama is elected president.

According to Robert Fisk of The Independent, Israel is going to have it easy, and the Arabs just as hard, no matter who is elected. No sooner is Obama (or McCain) elected then “he will be forced to take sides – Israel’s, of course -- and then it will be time for the next election.” Both the presidential candidates will be talking about Israel's security, not Palestinian security, and “we'll be back on the same old itinerary.”

Senator Obama's historic acceptance speech gives a strong hint of an in-built institutional bias against the Arabs. He pledges to end American dependence on Middle East oil in the next 10 years, which gives a misleading impression that the country is dangerously dependent on the Middle East for this commodity. The fact is that the US imports more oil from Canada than all the Arab countries in the Gulf. In making this invidious point Obama was to an extent playing to the hardball gallery.

Another fact apparently overlooked by observers is why Senator Obama has chosen for his Middle East policy advisers Dennis Ross, a former prominent staff member of Aipac, whom Robert Fisk blames for failing to make the Oslo agreement work and Madeleine Albright, who as US ambassador to the UN said that the price of half a million dead children under sanctions in Iraq was “worth it”. The reason Obama has chosen such prominent pro-Israeli advisers is that Israelis harbor doubts about him, and he is understandably anxious to allay them, even at the cost of hurting the Arabs. In the words of Israeli analyst Herb Keinon of the Jerusalem Post, privately, the prevalent feeling in Jerusalem's corridors of power is that in the Obama-McCain race, "more of the same," the epithet Obama is throwing at McCain, is not that bad.

The hard reality of American electoral politics is that no candidate who pursues an independent, balanced Middle East policy has a ghost of a chance of making it to the White House. The Arab people and governments should remember this and not fall into the trap of wishful thinking.