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CAMPAIGN '08
Allies of Palestinians see a friend in Barack Obama
They consider him receptive despite his clear support of Israel.
By Peter Wallsten
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

April 10, 2008

CHICAGO =97 It was a celebration of Palestinian culture -- a night of
music, dancing and a dash of politics. Local Arab Americans were
bidding farewell to Rashid Khalidi, an internationally known scholar,
critic of Israel and advocate for Palestinian rights, who was leaving
town for a job in New York.

A special tribute came from Khalidi's friend and frequent dinner
companion, the young state Sen. Barack Obama. Speaking to the crowd,
Obama reminisced about meals prepared by Khalidi's wife, Mona, and
conversations that had challenged his thinking.

His many talks with the Khalidis, Obama said, had been "consistent
reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases. . . . It's
for that reason that I'm hoping that, for many years to come, we
continue that conversation -- a conversation that is necessary not
just around Mona and Rashid's dinner table," but around "this entire
world."

Today, five years later, Obama is a U.S. senator from Illinois who
expresses a firmly pro-Israel view of Middle East politics, pleasing
many of the Jewish leaders and advocates for Israel whom he is
courting in his presidential campaign. The dinner conversations he
had envisioned with his Palestinian American friend have ended. He
and Khalidi have seen each other only fleetingly in recent years.

And yet the warm embrace Obama gave to Khalidi, and words like those
at the professor's going-away party, have left some Palestinian
American leaders believing that Obama is more receptive to their
viewpoint than he is willing to say.

Their belief is not drawn from Obama's speeches or campaign
literature, but from comments that some say Obama made in private and
from his association with the Palestinian American community in his
hometown of Chicago, including his presence at events where anger at
Israeli and U.S. Middle East policy was freely expressed.

At Khalidi's 2003 farewell party, for example, a young Palestinian
American recited a poem accusing the Israeli government of terrorism
in its treatment of Palestinians and sharply criticizing U.S. support
of Israel. If Palestinians cannot secure their own land, she said,
"then you will never see a day of peace."

One speaker likened "Zionist settlers on the West Bank" to Osama bin
Laden, saying both had been "blinded by ideology."

Obama adopted a different tone in his comments and called for finding
common ground. But his presence at such events, as he worked to build
a political base in Chicago, has led some Palestinian leaders to
believe that he might deal differently with the Middle East than
either of his opponents for the White House.

"I am confident that Barack Obama is more sympathetic to the position
of ending the occupation than either of the other candidates," said
Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow for the American Task Force on
Palestine, referring to the Israeli presence in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip that began after the 1967 war. More than his rivals for
the White House, Ibish said, Obama sees a "moral imperative" in
resolving the conflict and is most likely to apply pressure to both
sides to make concessions.

"That's my personal opinion," Ibish said, "and I think it for a very
large number of circumstantial reasons, and what he's said."

Aides say that Obama's friendships with Palestinian Americans reflect
only his ability to interact with a wide diversity of people, and
that his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been
consistent. Obama has called himself a "stalwart" supporter of the
Jewish state and its security needs. He believes in an eventual
two-state solution in which Jewish and Palestinian nations exist in
peace, which is consistent with current U.S. policy.

Obama also calls for the U.S. to talk to such declared enemies as
Iran, Syria and Cuba. But he argues that the Palestinian militant
organization Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, is an exception,
calling it a terrorist group that should renounce violence and
recognize Israel's right to exist before dialogue begins. That
viewpoint, which also matches current U.S. policy, clashes with that
of many Palestinian advocates who urge the United States and Israel
to treat Hamas as a partner in negotiations.

"Barack's belief is that it's important to understand other points of
view, even if you can't agree with them," said his longtime political
strategist, David Axelrod.

Obama "can disagree without shunning or demonizing those with other
views," he said. "That's far different than the suggestion that he
somehow tailors his view."

Looking for clues

But because Obama is relatively new on the national political scene,
and new to foreign policy questions such as the long-simmering
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, both sides have been looking closely
for clues to what role he would play in that dispute.

And both sides, on certain issues, have interpreted Obama's remarks
as supporting their point of view.

Last year, for example, Obama was quoted saying that "nobody's
suffering more than the Palestinian people." The candidate later said
the remark had been taken out of context, and that he meant that the
Palestinians were suffering "from the failure of the Palestinian
leadership [in Gaza] to recognize Israel" and to renounce violence.

Jewish leaders were satisfied with Obama's explanation, but some
Palestinian leaders, including Ibish, took the original quotation as
a sign of the candidate's empathy for their plight.

Obama's willingness to befriend Palestinian Americans and to hear
their views also impressed, and even excited, a community that says
it does not often have the ear of the political establishment.

Among other community events, Obama in 1998 attended a speech by
Edward Said, the late Columbia University professor and a leading
intellectual in the Palestinian movement. According to a news account
of the speech, Said called that day for a nonviolent campaign
"against settlements, against Israeli apartheid."

The use of such language to describe Israel's policies has drawn
vehement objection from Israel's defenders in the United States. A
photo on the pro-Palestinian website the Electronic Intifada shows
Obama and his wife, Michelle, engaged in conversation at the dinner
table with Said, and later listening to Said's keynote address. Obama
had taken an English class from Said as an undergraduate at Columbia
University.

Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian rights activist in Chicago who helps run
Electronic Intifada, said that he met Obama several times at
Palestinian and Arab American community events. At one, a 2000
fundraiser at a private home, Obama called for the U.S. to take an
"even-handed" approach toward Israel, Abunimah wrote in an article on
the website last year. He did not cite Obama's specific criticisms.

Abunimah, in a Times interview and on his website, said Obama seemed
sympathetic to the Palestinian cause but more circumspect as he ran
for the U.S. Senate in 2004. At a dinner gathering that year,
Abunimah said, Obama greeted him warmly and said privately that he
needed to speak cautiously about the Middle East.

Abunimah quoted Obama as saying that he was sorry he wasn't talking
more about the Palestinian cause, but that his primary campaign had
constrained what he could say.

Obama, through his aide Axelrod, denied he ever said those words, and
Abunimah's account could not be independently verified.

"In no way did he take a position privately that he hasn't taken
publicly and consistently," Axelrod said of Obama. "He always had
expressed solicitude for the Palestinian people, who have been
ill-served and have suffered greatly from the refusal of their
leaders to renounce violence and recognize Israel's right to exist."

In Chicago, one of Obama's friends was Khalidi, a highly visible
figure in the Arab American community.

In the 1970s, when Khalidi taught at a university in Beirut, he often
spoke to reporters on behalf of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation
Organization. In the early 1990s, he advised the Palestinian
delegation during peace negotiations. Khalidi now occupies a
prestigious professorship of Arab studies at Columbia.

He is seen as a moderate in Palestinian circles, having decried
suicide bombings against civilians as a "war crime" and criticized
the conduct of Hamas and other Palestinian leaders. Still, many of
Khalidi's opinions are troubling to pro-Israel activists, such as his
defense of Palestinians' right to resist Israeli occupation and his
critique of U.S. policy as biased toward Israel.

While teaching at the University of Chicago, Khalidi and his wife
lived in the Hyde Park neighborhood near the Obamas. The families
became friends and dinner companions.

In 2000, the Khalidis held a fundraiser for Obama's unsuccessful
congressional bid. The next year, a social service group whose board
was headed by Mona Khalidi received a $40,000 grant from a local
charity, the Woods Fund of Chicago, when Obama served on the fund's
board of directors.

At Khalidi's going-away party in 2003, the scholar lavished praise on
Obama, telling the mostly Palestinian American crowd that the state
senator deserved their help in winning a U.S. Senate seat. "You will
not have a better senator under any circumstances," Khalidi said.

The event was videotaped, and a copy of the tape was obtained by The
Times.

Though Khalidi has seen little of Sen. Obama in recent years,
Michelle Obama attended a party several months ago celebrating the
marriage of the Khalidis' daughter.

In interviews with The Times, Khalidi declined to discuss specifics
of private talks over the years with Obama. He did not begrudge his
friend for being out of touch, or for focusing more these days on his
support for Israel -- a stance that Khalidi calls a requirement to
win a national election in the U.S., just as wooing Chicago's large
Arab American community was important for winning local elections.

Khalidi added that he strongly disagrees with Obama's current views
on Israel, and often disagreed with him during their talks over the
years. But he added that Obama, because of his unusual background,
with family ties to Kenya and Indonesia, would be more understanding
of the Palestinian experience than typical American politicians.

"He has family literally all over the world," Khalidi said. "I feel a
kindred spirit from that."

Ties with Israel

Even as he won support in Chicago's Palestinian community, Obama
tried to forge ties with advocates for Israel.

In 2000, he submitted a policy paper to CityPAC, a pro-Israel
political action committee, that among other things supported a
unified Jerusalem as Israel's capital, a position far out of step
from that of his Palestinian friends. The PAC concluded that Obama's
position paper "suggests he is strongly pro-Israel on all of the
major issues."

In 2002, as a rash of suicide bombings struck Israel, Obama sought
out a Jewish colleague in the state Senate and asked whether he could
sign onto a measure calling on Palestinian leaders to denounce
violence. "He came to me and said, 'I want to have my name next to
yours,' " said his former state Senate colleague Ira Silverstein, an
observant Jew.

As a presidential candidate, Obama has won support from such
prominent Chicago Jewish leaders as Penny Pritzker, a member of the
family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain, and who is now his campaign
finance chair, and from Lee Rosenberg, a board member of the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Nationally, Obama continues to face skepticism from some Jewish
leaders who are wary of his long association with his pastor, the
Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who had made racially incendiary
comments during several sermons that recently became widely known.
Questions have persisted about Wright in part because of the recent
revelation that his church bulletin reprinted a Times op-ed written
by a leader of Hamas.

One Jewish leader said he viewed Obama's outreach to Palestinian
activists, such as Said, in the light of his relationship to Wright.

"In the context of spending 20 years in a church where now it is
clear the anti-Israel rhetoric was there, was repeated, . . . that's
what makes his presence at an Arab American event with a Said a
greater concern," said Abraham H. Foxman, national director for the
Anti-Defamation League.

peter.wallsten at latimes.com


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