Commentary: Which Obama program is worse? Domestic health care or Middle East ‘peace’ policy?

By Ira Sharkansky

Ira Sharkansky

JERUSALEM — ‘Anybody but Obama’ is a tempting, but risky thought as one approaches a decision about voting.

My Israeli and American heads contribute to this column as some call for the upcoming U.S. Midterm elections to be a referendum on Barack Obama.

At this point, some of my American friends will get themselves ready to say that I do not, or no longer understand their country. Sure, I haven’t voted in the United States since 1972, I can’t say who are the Senators from South Dakota, and have been more Israeli than American for some decades. However, I do not suffer from the worm’s eye view on American politics demonstrated by many of those who criticize my views. I consider what I do know from the perspective of living for extended periods in four countries, visiting more than 60, and knowing a reasonable amount about most of them from reading and listening. I adhere to the view that I teach my students: you cannot understand a country without comparing it to others.

My pondering today concerns whether BO has done more harm to American health care than he has done to the prospects of peace in this part of the Middle East.

The issue comes to the fore on account of one more article from a respected American source (The New York Times) about the fall-outs to date from his health reform, as well as continuing flaps closer to my home.

This article and others like it may help or frighten Americans who think they have access to decent health insurance. I do not have to bother my aging mind with such details of competing plans. I doubt that many of my younger American colleagues in academia will work themselves through the possibilities with a reasoned concerned for costs and benefits as applied to themselves and all family members, as this article suggests. I’m even more certain that colleagues my age will be less able to do it, and that the average American is somewhere at sea, or more correctly at the mercy of whatever insurance company he or she chooses.

When I read an article like that, I pat with thanks my HMO membership card. It has seen me and family members through several traumas without a wallet denting co-pay and no paperwork. Varda’s 93 year old mother can same the same, along with other Israelis and the vast majority of individuals who live in western democracies, except for the United States. 

As a result of Obama’s reform, things may be better for those Americans who become newly insured, assuming the numerous efforts to overturn the reform do not take hold in a court room or Congress. And assuming that there are enough health professionals to provide the additional care in ways substantially better than had been available in hospital emergency rooms.

It’s going to take a while to answer these questions. For the time being, opinion polls are suggesting that ‘Anybody but Obama’ is the operative slogan for more than a few Americans.

His damage to the Middle East is patently clearer than his damage to American health care. Before Obama, the West Bank economy was developing with a wave of overseas investment. Wealthy Palestinians throughout the world have sought to make a home for themselves or family members in Palestine, or to take advantage of opportunities to make money–as well as do good–by investing in the Palestinian economy. Security was improving due to the training provided in Jordan by a program financed by the United States. Israel was taking down check points, and allowing more West Bankers to enter Israel for work. There were few reports of incidents. Palestinians were more concerned to work, shop in the new malls, meet friends in the coffee houses, and enjoy the new cinemas than to express their hatred against Jews.

Enter Obama with a commitment to creating a Palestinian state within a year, and putting on the table the new issue of no construction in the Jewish settlements of the West Bank, including those neighborhoods of Jerusalem which Israel began building 43 years ago.

How to deal with the naysayers in firm control of Gaza, capable of sending rockets toward Israeli cities, and making trouble in the West Bank? What about the problematic legitimacy of the American agent Mahmoud Abbas, whose presidential term ended in January, 2009 and has hung on through scheduled and postponed elections since then?

The American administration had no answers that I encountered.

Disappointment and frustration seemed inevitable, and has arrived with an uptick in stone throwing and more serious violence. Abbas’ latest speech, that he would never recognize Israel as a Jewish state, stands alongside his refusal to accept Jews in the Palestinian state he demands.
If the sounds of Kaddish being said for the idea of a Palestinian state have not reached the White House, it is  only because those invited are initially screened for their sentiments.
Things are worse than they were before Obama, and may become worse yet.

If the promise, the blunders, failure of peace and frustration produce another intifada, it will be appropriate to call this one the Obama intifada.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Lebanon may inflame that country, either to a civil war and/or an increased threat against Israel. American efforts to engage have not moderated his rhetoric about Israel, his shipment of weapons to Lebanon or Gaza, or his incitement of tensions between Shi’ites and other Muslims.

As I think about the slogan of ‘Anybody but Obama,’ my Israeli experience cautions restraint. ‘Anybody but Peres’ was the slogan in the Knesset when he was a candidate for the presidency in 2000. The result was Moshe Katsav, since accused of two instances of rape and several more of sexual harassment. The drawn out nature of the judicial process may be explained partly by the ambivalence of prosecutors and judges about imprisoning the man who held the country’s highest office, albeit one whose nature is largely symbolic.

‘Anybody but Obama’ might produce a country run by Tea Parties and Sarah Palin. Perhaps one should think some more.

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Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University