Shattered Hopes: The Failure Of Obama’s Middle East Peace Process
by Josh Ruebner 
(Verso, £20)

There is a basic problem with this comprehensive analysis of what has happened since the United States’ incoming president promised at the beginning of his first term to “actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” 

That problem is in the book’s title, Shattered Hopes. 

What hopes? Did anyone seriously believe that President Obama would brave the wrath of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee zionist lobby by attempting to roll back the Israeli colonialist programme?  

Obama assuaged their hostility by declaring, from a helicopter hovering over the occupied West Bank, that “peace through security is the only way for Israel.”

Of course, the book could be a clever ploy. 

Rather than denouncing wholeheartedly the obfuscations and betrayals of this supposedly liberal African-American — actually a career politician who is turning out to be the biggest disappointment to liberals since President Kennedy approved the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 — Josh Ruebner takes those hopes at face value and demonstrates how Obama himself has shattered them.

This should not be any surprise. It was Obama who, as a senator with his eyes already on the White House, co-sponsored  the notorious Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act in June 2006 as a riposte to the success of Hamas in elections throughout the West Bank and Gaza. 

A month later, when Israeli gunships were pouring fire down upon the people of Gaza, the president co-sponsored another resolution supportive of the zionist state’s attacks.

All this and more can be read in this brilliantly documented analysis, even though it fails ultimately in establishing what should be clear.  Far from being a failure, Obama’s Middle East peace process is achieving its undeclared objective — refusing to deal with the legitimate elected representatives of the Palestinian people while at the same time extending the hand of friendship and military aid to the blood-stained hands of their oppressors.

A minor quibble is that the book’s reference to pro-Palestinian activism lists only US groups, with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign in a number of countries ignored.