Robert Fisk: Who Believes There Is ‘Progress’ in the Middle East?

Veteran journalist, writer and commentator Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent [republished on truthdig.com] on the latest attacks by Israelis on Gaza and where president-elect Obama fits into the scheme of things:

"If reporting is, as I suspect, a record of mankind’s folly, then the end of 2008 is proving my point.

Let’s kick off with the man who is not going to change the Middle East, Barack Obama, who last week, with infinite predictability, became Time’s “person of the year”. But buried in a long and immensely tedious interview inside the magazine, Obama devotes just one sentence to the Arab-Israeli conflict: “And seeing if we can build on some of the progress, at least in conversation, that’s been made around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will be a priority.”

What is this man talking about? “Building on progress?” What progress? On the verge of another civil war between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, with Benjamin Netanyahu a contender for Israeli prime minister, with Israel’s monstrous wall and its Jewish colonies still taking more Arab land, and Palestinians still firing rockets at Sderot, and Obama thinks there’s “progress” to build on?"

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