Taboos do not come single. Barack Obama must break other inter-related, equally formidable taboos — Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah. Indeed, it will be fascinating to watch him approach the mother of all taboos — Islamism.
Two hot, dry desert winds — khamsini and simoom — slice through the Middle East from the Levant to the Arabian Peninsula at this time of the year. The great winds appear as a blood-stint in the distant sky, and a blindly suffocating wall of dust materializes from nowhere. It is anybody’s guess whether the storm will ransack the heaving, strikingly reddish dunes for days, or pass by. It depends. It could be the khamsini(meaning 50 days in Arabic) or the simoom (poison wind). Simoom leaves as stealthily as it comes, seldom lasting more than 15 minutes – though it could make you feel that the end of the world has come.
The Middle East is agonising. Does U.S. President Barack Obama’s New Middle East diplomacy represent a wind of change as fundamental to the contours of the sand dunes as the khamsini or will turn out to be a burst of simoom? The answer increasingly is that change may be on the horizon. Doubting Thomases have lapsed into silence. A calm still envelops the region, which abounds in chimera.
All eyes were on an intense 90-minute first meeting between Mr. Obama and the newly elected hard-line Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Washington last Monday. None could be sure what would come of it. The speculation was that the two administrations, increasingly out of step with each other, might be heading for a confrontation. Several contentious issues have cropped up. Mr. Obama seems to visualise Israel entering into peace talks with the Arabs on the basis of “land-for-peace deals” in the West Bank and other occupied lands. For sure, Mr. Obama defines the “two-state” solution as the key to solving the Palestinian problem. Again, the Obama administration has been harping on a freeze on the construction of a new settlement housing by Israel. Finally, Washington and Israel have been manifestly differing in their approaches to the situation around Iran.
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