Would the isolation of America persuade Obama not to veto?

It might well have been their fear of a Tunisian domino effect that helped to embolden the regimes of the sponsoring Arab states to defy a U.S. administration on this occasion. Their challenge to America's unconditional support for Israel was, as Tony Karon noted, “a low-cost gesture that will play well on the restive street.” At least for a while, I add. (The truth about the Arab street is that for the past 40 years very many people on it have been humiliated and angered not only by Israel's arrogance of power and American support for it, but also by the complete failure of their own governments to use the leverage they do have to put real pressure on the U.S. to oblige Israel to end its occupation of all the Arab territory it grabbed in 1967).

If the sponsoring Arab regimes have the will to keep the heat on Washington over the resolution and insist that there must be a vote on it at some point in the not too distant future, and if the number of nations who support the resolution stays firm and better still increases, crunch time for Obama on the Israel-Palestine conflict will arrive.

If and when it does he will have three options: to veto; to order America's vote in the Security Council to be cast for the resolution; or to abstain. An American abstention would have the same practical effect as a "Yes" vote - the resolution would be passed.

A veto would protect Obama from the wrath of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress. But it would also propel America further down the road to isolation, perhaps to the point where, like Israel, it was regarded as a pariah state by much of the world. Can Obama or any American president really afford that?

But an American vote for the resolution or even an abstention would, of course, put Obama into head-on confrontation with the Zionist lobby. Could he come out of it a winner (and, some will add, remain alive)?

My crystal ball doesn't tell me the answer, but it does indicate how he could be the first American president to break the Zionist lobby's stranglehold on America policy for the Middle East. If he went over the heads of Congress and used his rhetorical skill to explain to his people why it is not in America's own best interests to go on supporting Israel right or wrong, there's a chance that he could win the argument. Americans are not stupid. What they are, most of them, is extremely gullible because of the way they have been mis-informed, lied to, by a mainstream media which, for a number of reasons, is content to peddle Zionist propaganda.

It's your call, Mr. President. The fate of the region (the Middle East) and quite possibly the whole world will be determined by it.

Footnote

If the U.S. endorses the Whitewash Israeli inquiry into Israel's deadly attack on the Free Gaza Flotilla last May, we'll know that the prospects of Obama putting America's own interest first at crunch time are very, very remote, to say the least.