The president made a speech at the State Department the other day outlining his policy priorities.

It had already become obvious with his appointment of Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff that his policy towards Israel would offer little change from that of the Bush administration. Now the inhabitants of Gaza know that they can look forward to more of the same.

According to Obama, the carnage inflicted by the overwhelming military superiority of Israel was an appropriate response to the Palestinian provocations:

For years, Hamas has launched thousands of rockets at innocent Israeli citizens. No democracy can tolerate such danger to its people, nor should the international community, and neither should the Palestinian people themselves, whose interests are only set back by acts of terror.

Obama’s failure to mention that the rockets were a response to Israel’s refusal to open the borders as agreed--people were dying of starvation in Gaza as a result--demonstrated that Israel, in the eyes of this administration, can do no wrong.

Consequently, we should expect no satisfactory resolution of the Palestinian problem during Obama’s administration. Israel has made Gaza into what is, for all practical purposes, a concentration camp, and the next time the inmates become restless, the Israeli military will again deliver a vicious and indiscriminate punishment to everyone living there, irrespective of civilian status, gender, or age, as it has just done. And it will be done with the blessings of this administration.

It is becoming clear that there is no room anywhere in Greater Israel for the indigenous people who live there now or who once lived there. Given the progressive strangulation of Gaza and the expansion of settlements in the West Bank, it seems as though the Israelis are planning their own Final Solution to the Palestinian problem.

Do we really want our nation to be the enabler for this?

Tom Lowe