By Charles Fromm and Ellen Massey
WASHINGTON, Jan 22 2010 (IPS)

One year ago Thursday, the last Israeli tanks were lumbering out of the Gaza Strip, ending the 22-day Gaza War and leaving in their wake a decimated landscape and population.

A year later, the humanitarian and security situation in the devastated coastal enclave remains dire, yet the Barack Obama administration continues to overlook the crisis in Gaza, an approach which some experts say is an extension of the previous administration’s policy.

This policy has also done little to alleviate what human rights groups warn is a growing humanitarian crisis, plunging the Gaza Strip further into poverty and insecurity.

Sworn into office in the midst of the Gaza War, President Obama gave early prominence to the Middle East peace process in his administration’s foreign policy. Yet that rhetoric has failed to materialise into progress on the peace process or relief for the people of Gaza.

The U.S. remains resolute in its refusal to engage with Hamas, the Islamist party that now rules Gaza and is designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organisation. This policy began to have a dramatic affect upon Gazans in 2007, under President George W. Bush, when Hamas took control of the territory.

“Obama showed his trajectory early on,” said Paul Woodward, editor and creator of the reputable blog warincontext.org. “The U.S. made a decision to sideline Hamas after the 2006 [Palestinian] elections, which they and Israel [had initially] supported- marginalising Hamas and by default, marginalising Gaza.”

“The Obama administration has engaged in much more cosmetic changes than strategic changes,” Woodward told IPS.

Such cosmetic changes included soaring rhetoric that reached out to Arab and Muslim communities in an effort to strengthen ties that had been weakened under the previous administration.

“America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own,” Obama said during his landmark speech in Cairo.

Despite such commitments, Gaza, which has been subject to a tightening blockade by neighbouring Israel and Egypt since 2007, continues to languish without access to the necessary humanitarian aid, reconstruction materials, and trade opportunities that would allow it to recover from the devastating conflict.

As the crisis deepens, U.S. complicity in the siege is becoming more evident in the eyes of the Arab world.

“The idea that the U.S. is impotent… is something that no Palestinian in Gaza who we met believed,” said Amjad Atallah, at a Brookings Institution event last week. Atallah is the co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.

The Gaza War, also known as Operation Cast Lead, was a three-week battle between Hamas militants and the Israeli army last winter. The conflict resulted in widespread devastation and casualties in Gaza, where more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed. There were 13 Israeli causalities suffered from Hamas-launched rockets and during the ground incursion into the territory.

According to Human Rights Watch, the blockade has forced 80 percent of Gaza’s population of 1.5 million people to rely upon humanitarian aid and a black market supplied by smugglers.

Smuggling tunnels below the Gaza/Egypt border are the only remaining link to the outside world for the Gaza’s citizens, and have “literally driven Gaza’s economy underground,” said Daniel Levy, co-director of the Middle East Task Force, at the Brookings event.

Yet even this last loophole in the blockade is threatened. According to the BBC, Egypt has started work on an underground barrier, with the help of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which cuts off the cross-border tunnel system used by smugglers to circumvent the siege.

“I don’t think there has ever been an instance in history when the United States played such a complicated role in the physical blockading of a population – it’s no wonder they don’t want to take any credit for it,” said Yousef Munnayer, executive director of the Palestine Centre, about the Obama administration’s understated participation in the cordon of the Gaza Strip.

Some analysts believe the wall is a strategic maneuver on the part of the U.S. to pressure Hamas into a reconciliation with Fatah, the dominant political party in the West Bank, in order to restart stalled peace talks.

“Egypt’s tough new stance toward Hamas is enabled by Cairo’s current efforts to restart peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation… Hamas is being squeezed on all fronts,” said Yossi Alpher, the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, in his column in The Jewish Daily Forward.

While the Obama administration has failed to follow through on its commitments to relieve the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the United States Congress has, it seems, largely ignored it. Since January 2009, a resolution in the U.S. House of Representatives that expresses concern about the situation in Gaza has stalled in the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

In contrast, last November the House overwhelmingly supported a resolution that condemned the Goldstone Report, the product of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza conflict. The report, named after respected jurist Richard Goldstone, found both Hamas and Israel committed war crimes during the 22-day conflict.

Rep. Keith Ellison was one of only 58 representatives to vote against or abstain from voting on the resolution. He also represents one of only a handful of U.S. elected officials who have visited the Gaza Strip, while more than 70 members of Congress have traveled to the region. During his trip to the territory in February 2009, Ellison met with residents of both Gaza and the Israeli border town of Sderot.

“When someone like [Rep.] Keith Ellison visits Gaza, I would say that does more for American security in the Middle East and your public diplomacy than virtually anything else we’ve seen this year,” Levy said at a briefing on Capitol Hill Wednesday.

But Ellison remains an outlier among members of Congress. “If you want to know how much knowledge there is [among] my colleagues in Congress, all you need to do is look at the vote on the Goldstone Report,” Ellison told the audience at the Brooking Institution last week.

“I bet nobody read the Goldstone Report or even the executive summary. So we’re ready to condemn a report which we have not read at all,” he added, describing his colleagues in the House of Representatives.

The combination of the war and the continued siege has plunged the Gaza Strip into crippling poverty and the effects of the closure on the health sector have been catastrophic. Amnesty International reported recently that chronic shortages in equipment and medical supplies are routine, leaving health professionals with insufficient resources to treat their patients.

Even as the Obama administration attempts to re-start the peace process, Gaza casts a looming shadow over any such efforts. Some experts claim that peace negotiations are futile until the siege in Gaza has been addressed.

“That’s the precondition for everything,” said Andrew Whitley, director of the Representative Office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, in reference to the lifting of the blockade in Gaza.

Excerpt:

Four months ago, the Barack Obama administration announced that it would appoint an ambassador to Syria, ending a four-year freeze on diplomatic relations between the two countries.

That announcement came as a part of a larger foreign policy rhetoric that emphasised dialogue with both friend and foe. But what real impact has this new approach had?

There have been measurable steps taken to unthaw a Syrian-U.S. relationship that has been decidedly chilly since early 2005 and the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

Since the Obama administration moved into White House in January, there have been six high-level meetings between Syrian officials and the executive branch, including a visit to Washington by Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Fayssal Mekdad in September, the highest-ranking Syrian official to visit the city in more than five years.

While the fact that the ambassador to Damascus is yet to be named might be troubling at first glance, the still vacant post may be more a result of bureaucratic haggling than anything else.

“The progress towards an ambassador is still on,” said Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma and author of the widely-read blog, Syria Comment.

Landis noted that Imad Moustapha, Syria’s ambassador to the United States, went to the State Department at the end of last week and communicated that things were positive.

“Talking with the U.S. today is night and day between Bush and today,” Landis reported the ambassador as saying.

Yet despite the outward attempts at mutual rapprochement, deep undercurrents threaten the progress of this fledgling relationship.

Michael Hudson, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and an expert on the Syrian political scene, pointed to several factors that might have stalled any new progress. Not least among these are renewed allegations by the Iraqi government that Syria has at least indirectly supported bombings and violence in Iraq, Hudson said.

Indeed, Syria’s role in Iraq and allegations that its border serves as a refuge for ex-Baathist fighters in Iraq has been a point of contention and one of negotiation between the U.S. and Syria for a while, dating back to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s 2007 meetings with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al- Moallem, which were strictly limited to Syria’s role in the neighbouring country.

Beyond Syria’s influence in Iraq, Landis described deep-seeded “structural problems” that hinder the U.S.-Syrian relationship. At the top of this list is the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The 1,200 square kilometre strip of land bordered by Syria, Israel, Lebanon and Jordan is strategically important because of its location, but also because it is a major water source in the arid region. Syria wants the territory back and many analysts and international resolutions have called for Israel’s withdrawal from the region as a part of peace talks between the two countries.

But Israel has balked at any such suggestion. “Netanyahu rejects this Syrian requirement as a precondition, even though several previous Israeli prime ministers, beginning with Rabin, did just that,” Theodore Kattouf told the Center for American Progress in an interview with its Middle East Progress blog in mid-October.

Kattouf is a former ambassador to Syria and the current president and CEO of AMIDEAST.

Landis added to this point, telling IPS that for Israel, “There’s no pressure to give up anything. I mean, why would Israel give up the Golan? For what? For Syria, [in Israel’s view] a two-bit country? No way.”

However, Landis’s description of the power balance between Israel and Syria takes on new meaning when tempered by his acknowledgement that the United States has very little leverage in Syria.

“Syria’s not going to do anything for America. Why? Because Syria has come to the conclusion that President Obama cannot reverse sanctions,” he said. “The one short-term thing that Syria wants, short of the Golan Heights, is to have sanctions reversed.”

The U.S. sanctions against Syria are the purview of Congress and were renewed earlier this fall with the support of the Obama administration. And indeed there is little domestic or international support for ending the sanctions regime, especially as Syria continues to facilitate the movement of arms, equipment and money to Hizbollah and Hamas.

The lack of U.S. influence in Syria has been further compounded by Syria’s growing alliances in the Middle East. President Bashar Al-Assad’s regime has refused to pull back from the country’s longtime relationship with Iran, even while there has been a softening of rhetoric between Syria and anti-Iran governments like the United States and Saudi Arabia.

Yet the rapprochement between Syria and Saudi Arabia has proceeded with King Abdullah’s first visit to Damascus as head of state taking place last month.

Ties between Syria and Turkey have also been improving this year, ending years of mistrust between the neighbouring states that was based largely on Turkey’s allegations that Syria was supporting the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The new relationship includes economic and military cooperation measures.

With Syria pulling out of its regional isolation, “There may be a certain kind of irritation here in Washington that Syrians are developing and cultivating regional and local allies and thus gaining a certain leverage that they might not have had before,” Hudson told IPS.

As the U.S. relationship with Syria continues to evolve, it seems that the structural problems between Damascus and Washington have larger implications for U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Syria sits at the epicentre of United States interests and investment in the region, and previous U.S. policies of seeking to change Syria’s behaviour through isolation have effectively failed.

Yet as new ways forward are pursued, Landis points out that the U.S. Congress’s often unconditional support of Israel has left little negotiating room for the Obama State Department. “That means whatever it means for Lebanon and Iraq and other things,” Landis said. “All these issues aren’t going to be resolved, and they’re going to continue to grind away.”

Some plans have been put forward that attempt progress in the U.S-Syrian relationship while skirting the bulk of the issues.

Kattouf suggested in his interview with Middle East Progress that the U.S. not stand in the way of Syria’s anticipated application to the World Trade Organisation, support the EU’s association agreement should Syria decide to sign it, and provide additional resources for Syria to sustain the more than one million refugees that have sought haven there.

Similarly, the International Crisis Group in a February report suggested a recalibration of sanctions on the basis of clear policy objectives.

However, these steps are incremental along the path toward a real relationship between the United States and Syria, and it remains to be seen if, or how, the Obama administration will pursue that goal.