Obama - Israel 's best friend?

He seems to want to be...

The full speech, here.

I think this article by Shmuel Rosner has got its finger on the pulse of the times ( that's partly in response to the comment by NWO):

Obama is not just a candidate - he's the candidate, a candidate who is the son of a black man and a white woman. He will make his acceptance speech at the Democratic convention on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. No campaign manager could have planned it better, none could have picked a more dramatic day.

[...]

There are enough reasons to prefer McCain to Obama, or Clinton to Obama, regarding their intended policy toward Iran. But even those who oppose him should put aside their political preferences, fear of the future and their pros and cons list for just a moment. Now is the time to take in Obama's astounding political victory, if one can still feel awe for anything in this day and age. Against all the odds, the campaign broke down the boundaries of bias and race, and brought out voters to cast their ballots. They may be naive, but they are not indifferent. They may be a little childish, but they aren't cynical.

Back in January, David Brooks, an Obama sceptic at the very least, already marked the extraordinary historicality (if we can say such a word) of Obama's campaign and his due awe of the achievement. It is doubly true today:

And Americans are not going to want to see this stopped. When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say No?

Obama will never be able to fulfil the huge hopes his supporters pin on him. But already he has achieved what a year ago seemed a surefire impossibility. Much of the credit probably goes to his campaign managers. Just look at the meticulous way he rectified his Auschwitz mistake in his speech to AIPAC. Rather than remaining silent on that embarrassing gaff, he repeated his family's WWII history, this time with all the facts intact. It says a lot more about his ethical principles than all the other fine words and stirring rhetoric. It says he can learn from his mistakes and make an effort to get things right, the next time around. And he is not shy about showing that he can learn, and has learned.

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Palestinian response:

Hamas: "Hamas does not differentiate between the two presidential candidates, Obama and McCain, because their policies regarding the Arab-Israel conflict are the same and are hostile to us, therefore we do have no preference and are not wishing for either of them to win."

Abbass: "Jerusalem is one of the files under negotiation. The entire world knows perfectly well that we will never accept a state without Jerusalem. That should be clear."

Saeb Erekat goes even further, and already expresses nostalgia to past American administrations:

"We reject the positions of Barack Obama because they are in contradiction with the traditional positions of the United States which considers that east Jerusalem is under occupation."

I'm not sure he is correct about these "traditional positions". After all, there is that Congressional resolution which at least rhetorically committed to relocating the American Embassy to Jerusalem, but the general sentiment is that of disappointment with the expectations Palestinians had nurtured towards Obama. The irony of this reversal is acute. No one hated President Bush more than the Palestinians, considering him sold out to Israel. And here they are, beginning to appreciate his policies when it is probably too late. A typical Palestinian error of judgment. When will they ever learn?