Khaled Hroub
Director of Media Programme, Gulf Research Centre-Cambridge

In a quick and angry response to UNESCO's decision to admit Palestine as a full member, the US administration stopped its $60 million annual contribution to the organisation's budget. Almost immediately, a flurry of condemnations of the American reaction erupted in the pan-Arab media. Once the news was broadcast, hundreds of frustrated viewers posted angry comments on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya websites, both based in the Gulf and considered to be the leading news websites in Arabic. Particularly since the UNESCO step is more symbolic than anything else, the US reaction is seen to be way out of proportion.

General Arab frustration at the blindly pro-Israeli policies of the US has become compounded especially after Washington's (over)reaction to the Palestinian call for full statehood status at the UN in September. At that time, American pressure on the Palestinian leadership to withdraw their application ranged across the whole spectrum and continued to the very last minute. Not only were threats made including cutting annual aid to the Palestinian Authority, but President Barack Obama was reported to have held the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas personally responsible for any drop of American blood that might be shed in connection with the American veto against the Palestinian request. Some lawmakers in the US Congress have already started drafting measures to punish the Palestinians by effecting financial cuts. It could be said that the strong overall American reaction across the political spectrum in Washington has taken a harder line against the Palestinian petition than that taken in Tel Aviv.

Palestinian and other Arab commentators criticise the Americans for becoming plus royaliste que le roi, pointing to the many voices inside Israel that have been calling upon the government not only to accept the Palestinian move, but to support it. When the Palestinians started seriously considering this strategy over the past year, a prominent group of Israeli intellectuals and politicians, many of them holding prestigious Israeli awards, issued a statement, in April, in support of the declaration of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. This new Palestinian strategy of pursuing higher diplomatic status at the UN is bound within international law and creates no contradiction with any of the previous UN resolutions. In fact it is a harmless step which conforms to the parameters of the long-conducted peace process which has made the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 boundaries its ultimate goal.

The short-sighted American reaction to Palestine's UN bid can only be understood as a means of appeasing the strong Jewish-American lobbies in light of the coming elections. Such electioneering tactics, in blockheadedly showing imagined support for Israel against the almost universal support to legitimate Palestinian rights acknowledged by the US itself, will cost the Americans a high and unwarranted price. Israel is not under any existential threat that could justify the hysterical American reaction. Neither is the US even in full consensual agreement with the hard line populist politics of Israel's current government. There has recently been a need for even more rational and balanced American positioning vis-a-vis the Palestinian effort rather than the head-to-head clashes in the context of which  Obama's speech at the UN will be noted in history as the most Zionist speech delivered by an American president ever.

But what is really new about all this when American policies have always sided with Israel in good times and bad? Well, actually, there are two new developments that would render an American continuation of old policies in this respect more damaging than before: the recent Arab revolutions along with what the US has invested in supporting them; and the more assertive Gulf positions supporting the Palestinians.

By adopting such a blindly over-blown line of support to the current right-wing Israeli government, the US is simply losing all the gains that it might have garnered from the Arab Spring. Starting with revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt back in January, Washington faced the dilemma of either moving along with the rising sentiment in the Arab street which would change pro-Western regimes, or support their ailing and corrupt governments. The carefully calculated positions and neatly worded statements that Washington made in response to the speedy success of these revolutions had been meant to keep a balanced stance: to side with the wave of change, but to keep other allies in the Arab region assured of American support. In the end, the official American position was read by their allies in the region as tilting towards these revolutions even if they led to the toppling of the old regimes. At the level of Arab public perception, the American stance in ditching the Tunisian and Egyptian presidents had shaken the long-lived and deep-seated anti-American sentiment in the region. One could argue that for the first time in the past two decades parts of Arab public opinion were nudged out of their strong black anti-American feeling into a decidedly lighter 'grey' area.

This move from a black and white perception of the US to a 'grey' area in a span of a mere few months should have been considered a massive strategic achievement. All previous efforts over the past decade and longer, and investments in 'Public Diplomacy' and other fruitless projects, had yielded very little. Winning the 'hearts and minds' of the Arabs required real change in politics, and many Arabs had started to see the beginning of such a change in the Arab Spring. This beginning seemed to have redressed for a while the frustration and loss of hope in President Obama, especially after the high expectations he managed to raise in his Istanbul and Cairo speeches in April and June 2009, respectively.

Yet, all efforts that the US has made, or the little achievements that it has been gaining on the Arab/Muslim public opinion front, have been continuously whittled away because of the way it has dealt with the Palestine/Israel issue. The credibility that Obama had projected in the first year of his presidency, which rapidly changed much of the negative image of the US among Arabs and Muslims, would later fail because of the stubborn Israeli position on settlements. As a condition set by the international community and by the US itself in the Roadmap for Peace, Obama pressed the Israelis to freeze building settlements prior to the resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. The Israelis rejected his demand and have continued right up to the very present to construct new settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Obama did nothing, or, being unable to do anything, lost his face and credibility in the Arab and Muslim world, one may even add humiliatingly! A common metaphor that was frequently used in the Arab press depicted the US bowing on its knees before Israel.

The other new and noticeable development which would further expose America's pro-Israel policies is the new foreign policy of the Gulf countries, individually or as a GCC bloc. The Arab Spring has given the GCC an unprecedented role in leading collective Arab action, in Libya, Yemen and Syria. Egypt, Iraq and Syria, the countries that until recently would claim Arab leadership or enjoyed great influence on other Arab countries, have all taken the back seat each for obvious reasons. Within the framework of the Arab League or even outside it, the GCC bloc seems to remain, and perhaps despite many internal shortcomings, the only coherent Arab bloc that is able to function collectively and show leadership. On the Palestine front, this has been exhibited in the challenging remarks made by the Saudi prince Turki Al-Faisal in the American press, stating boldly that his country will support the Palestinian UN move without reservation. It was the concrete GCC support for the Palestinian president at the UN, according to many accounts, which had strengthened his position. There is some serious talk within the GCC that it (along with Turkey) should step in if the American threats of cutting the annual half a billion dollar or so support to the Palestinian Authority were to materialise. However, Washington is fully aware that a cut in aid would mean a cut in leverage, thus such an extreme measure would actually be very unlikely.

In the moving sands of the post-revolutions Arab region, the usual American policies towards the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have become out of date. What Washington attempts to build and invest with certain policies is destroyed and divested by other policies. Unless a radical change and a major shift in Washington's policies on Palestine is pursued, winning the hearts and minds of the Arabs seems likely to be a futile exercise - as the old Arab proverb most accurately describes, the Americans pointlessly 'are ploughing the sea'!

Khaled Hroub is Director of the Media Programme at the Gulf Research Centre-Cambridge