How can we dare hope that President Barack Obama will succeed in ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the two-state solution, when he cannot, even with a democratic majority in both Houses of Congress, pass his healthcare plan for the Americans? President Obama has no personal interests in the proposed bill; rather, it carries a significant amount of risk since Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary failed to pass a similar bill between 1993 and 1994. If the new president wanted to rid himself of this quandary, he would not have thought about reforming healthcare in the first place. But he knows that the world's top superpower lacks universal healthcare, and specifically healthcare for the poor, which is otherwise present in all other industrial countries, and even in former Soviet countries and others. Barack Obama, however, is facing opposition from some democrats, and from the known pressure groups and the Republican Party. Also, the right wing in America wants the black anti-war president – who started a new page with Muslims – defeated at any price, even if that price was a new terrorist attack in America similar to the attacks of 11/9/2001; this is all in the hope that Obama will fail, and that the same gang of war returns to power, having its front as another demented Reagan, or another stupid Bush, or through Palin who only knows how to wear her lipstick. In fact, President Obama had achieved an unprecedented breakthrough during his election campaign: 13.5 million Americans donated money to this campaign, with 1.5 million volunteers working for it. Obama also enjoys broad popular support. Nonetheless, he seems to be weaker than the pressure groups that are facing off with him; even the insurance companies lobby almost defeated him during the first squabbles concerning the healthcare reforms. After the first deadline for the Senate to deliberate the bill in the first week of August was missed, the Congress returned from summer recess in the middle of September. Now, however, there are two bills being proposed, one by the Senate and the other by the House of Representatives, both being radically different from each other, and both different than what the president had wanted in the beginning. Special committees will then study the bills at the end of next month, and new compromises and bartering will begin to take place, or a “horse trade” as the expression in English suggests. When it comes to peace in the Middle East, the political atmosphere accompanying the healthcare reform plan becomes significantly much worse, as the above mentioned pressure groups all support Israel. This is in addition to the known lobby that has bought the majority of members in both houses of Congress, to the extent that there was an almost unanimous position [in favor of Israel] on the war on Gaza, in which the United Nations announced this week that Israel had committed war crimes. The founding fathers had laid the foundations of a great state, built on the separation of church and state, and on three separate branches of authority that are governed by mutual checks and balances, along with a free press that is the fourth branch which monitors everyone. In 1776, the United States was an agricultural country, and the industrial revolution was still in its beginning. Although some of the founding fathers had the adequate foresight to warn of the influence of money, they could not truly appreciate its forthcoming power that would ruin Congress, and render it a hostage in the hands of the pressure groups that fund the candidates' campaigns. Again, this becomes far more serious when Israel is at the center of the issue, and it is enough in this regard to compare the influence of the health insurance companies with that of the Israeli lobby to realize that the first is no match for the latter. The lobbyists for the insurance companies were influential enough to push thousands of Americans to protest against their own interests, while holding pictures of Obama with Che Guevara's beret over his head and chanting against socialism. Similarly, the Israeli lobby can easily convince even larger numbers of Americans that it is the Palestinians who are occupying Israeli lands, and murdering Jewish women and children while they are raising white banners and that it is them [the Palestinians] who traffic the organs of the Jewish “martyrs”. I have a great deal of confidence in the good intentions of Barack Obama, and in his desire to do what benefits the Americans and the cause of peace in the world. However, I do not have the same confidence in his ability to achieve his objectives, as long as money, the lobby and the gang of war still control U.S. policy from behind the curtain, or from behind a thousand curtains.
