One can analogize the Arabs today to someone in a fast food restaurant that sells hamburgers ordering falafel. “But we only sell hamburgers. Maybe we would sell falafel in the future,” he is told. Unfortunately, we are impatient people. We want to have our order before everybody else. We want a hamburger joint to sell falafel. And if the joint rejects, we hold massive demonstrations. President-elect Barack Obama today is only preoccupied with the global financial crisis (the hamburger). So if we talked to him about Palestine (the falafel) he will not hear us. And if we all demonstrated for him to put Palestine as a priority on the agenda of the U.S. administration he will not do it. He is now busy with the ‘hamburger' as his most important priority. So we should talk to him today about the ‘hamburger' so that he would listen to us tomorrow when we talk about the ‘falafel'. We must talk to him about what concerns him so that he would also talk to us then about what concerns us. This is the first advice. The second advice is that Obama's administration will not look at the Palestinians as long as there is a Palestine of Haniyeh, a Palestine of Abbas, a Palestine of Hamas and a Palestine of the Liberation Organization. Obama and his vice-president Joseph Biden only know of one Palestine that is headed by Mahmoud Abbas, its internationally recognized president. Those who think Obama would deal with Hamas are wrong. He will be in confrontation with Hamas and not a friend because his winning of the presidential election is a defeat for the U.S. far right that formed the ideological basis for the Bush administration. It is also a defeat for any other extreme right in the world. In his speech in Chicago on November 4, Obama said: “To those who want to disrupt the world I say we will beat you. And to those who want peace I say we will support you.” The first part of this statement means that Obama has defeated the far right at home and is prepared to confront the extreme right abroad. So he will not be a friend of Hamas or the Islamic extremists. He will only deal with the countries that adopt political and economic liberalism. Anyone else will be rejected by his administration. The world was stunned by the vast powers given to Vice-President Dick Cheney. Today, the world will be more stunned by the greater powers that will be given to Joseph Biden. When Biden was head of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate he invited me to talk about the situation in the Middle East. We met for an hour and a half. The man was quite familiar with the issues of the Middle East. The point I am making here is that Obama's team knows a lot about the Middle East. What it only needs from us Arabs is to talk with them about other pressing problems of concern to the United States and the world so that we do not appear as people that are isolated only in our own problems.
And had Obama stayed in Kenya, he would not have even become mayor of the village where his grandmother is living now, no matter how brilliant he was. Our authoritarian regimes do not allow the emergence of an Obama. This happens only in America. Obama marks the first product of globalization. He marks the end of the myth of ethnic purity. His father was a black Kenyan and his mother a white American. He was educated in Islamic schools in Indonesia. Then he went to live with his Christian grandmother in Hawaii. He became the senator of Illinois. Obama is the new human breed with a multi- identity, a diverse geographical memory and a mixed ethnicity. The whole world was cheering for Obama to be President of the United States. All European capitals from Berlin to London, where there is no colored Head of State, were with him. We must learn how to promote our causes. If the Arabs did not show interest in issues of the world and did not play an active role in them, they cannot expect that the world would be interested in them. It is naïve to think there is any issue more important to the new U.S. administration other than the global financial crisis. The Arabs must reformulate their causes into a larger context if they wanted the attention of the new president.
