Biden, Palin and the Obliteration of Palestinians

Last week Barack Obama and John McCain in their first and ostensibly only debate on foreign policy both managed to go the entire 97 minutes of the spectacle without mentioning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (or most other issues central to Middle East policy, as the portions devoted to the subject show).

Joe Biden and Sarah Palin weren't as oblivious in their vice-presidential bout Thursday. Both the heavyweight and the bantamweight willingly took on the standard-issue Middle East concerns (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan), but when it came to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the way they went about discussing it was even more disturbing than McCain and Obama ignoring the issue altogether.

Moderator Gwen Ifill framed the question pointedly: "What has this administration done right or wrong -- this is the great, lingering, unresolved issue, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- what have they done? And is a two-state solution the solution?" The question is multi-layered. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is "the great, lingering, unresolved issue." The Bush administration has been the least engaged of any administration since Lyndon Johnson. Ifill even soft-balled her delivery by giving that opening to a "two-state solution," which was really unnecessary. She should have left the two candidates to formulate an answer without one being formulated for them.

Still, while both Biden and Palin embraced the two-state solution bit, they also did something else that the entire Middle East picked up on, even if Middle America couldn't care less: neither mentioned the word "Palestinian," let alone "Palestine." Not once. They could have been talking about a two-state solution between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Robert Fisk put it bluntly:

Palestinians ceased to exist in the United States on Thursday night. Both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin managed to avoid the use of that poisonous word. "Palestine" and "Palestinians" – that most cancerous, slippery, dangerous concept – simply did not exist in the vice-presidential debate. The phrase "Israeli occupation" was mercifully left unused. Neither the words "Jewish colony" nor "Jewish settlement" – not even that cowardly old get-out clause of American journalism, "Jewish neighbourhood" – got a look-in. Nope. Those bold contenders of the US vice-presidency, so keen to prove their mettle when it comes to "defence", hid like rabbits from the epicentre of the Middle East earthquake: the existence of a Palestinian people.

Here's a complete analysis of the Biden-Palin debate regarding their Middle East policies, from Israel to Iraq and beyond.