In perhaps his boldest foreign policy move during his presidency, Barack Obama Wednesday announced that he intends to establish full diplomatic relations with Cuba.
While the president noted that he lacked the authority to lift the 54-year-old trade embargo against Havana, he issued directives that will permit more American citizens to travel there and third-country subsidiaries of US companies to engage in commerce. Other measures include the launching a review of whether Havana should remain on the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism.” The president also said he looked forward to engaging Congress in “an honest and serious debate about lifting the embargo.”
“In the most significant changes in our policy in more than fifty years, we will end an outdated approach that, for decades, has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries,” said Obama in a nationally televised announcement.
“Through these changes, we intend to create more opportunities for the American and Cuban people, and begin a new chapter among the nations of the Americas.”
The announcement, which was preceded by a secret, 45-minute telephone conversation Tuesday morning between Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro, drew both praise from those who have long argued that Washington’s pursuit of Cuba’s isolation has been a total failure and bitter denunciations from right-wing Republicans. Some of them vowed, among other things, to oppose any effort to lift the embargo, open the US embassy in Havana, or confirm a US ambassador to serve there. (Washington has had an Interest Section in the Cuban capital since 1977.)
“Today’s announcement initiating a dramatic change in US policy is just the latest in a long line of failed attempts by President Obama to appease rogue regimes at all costs,” said Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, one of a number of fiercely anti-Castro Cuban-American lawmakers and a likely candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.
“I intend to use my role as incoming Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Western Hemisphere subcommittee to make every effort to block this dangerous and desperate attempt by the President to burnish his legacy at the Cuba people’s expense,” he said in a statement. “Appeasing the Castro brothers will only cause other tyrants from Caracas to Tehran to Pyongyang to see that they can take advantage of President Obama’s naiveté during his final two years in office.”
The outgoing Democratic chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, New Jersey Sen. Robert Menendez, also decried Obama’s announcement. “The United States has just thrown the Cuban regime an economic lifeline,” he said.
“With the collapse of the Venezuelan economy, Cuba is losing its main benefactor, but will now receive the support of the United States, the greatest democracy in the world,” said Menendez, who is also Cuban-American.
But other lawmakers hailed the announcement.
Today President Obama and President Raul Castro made history,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a senior Democrat and one of three lawmakers, including Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, who escorted Alan Gross, a US Agency for International Development (USAID) contractor, from Havana Wednesday morning as part of a larger prisoner and spy swap that precipitated the announcement.
“Those who cling to a failed policy (and) …may oppose the President’s actions have nothing to offer but more of the same. That would serve neither the interests of the United States and its people, nor of the Cuban people,” Leahy said. “It is time for a change.”
Other analysts also lauded Obama’s Wednesday’s developments, comparing them to historic breakthroughs with major foreign policy consequences.
“Obama has chosen to change the entire framework of the relationship, as (former President Richard) Nixon did when he travelled to China,” said William LeoGrande, a veteran Cuba scholar at American University, in an email from Havana. “Many issues remain to be resolved, but the new direction of US policy is clear.”
Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington-based hemispheric think tank that has long urged Washington to normalize ties with Havana, told IPS the regional implications would likely be very positive.
“Obama’s decision will be cheered and applauded throughout Latin America,” he said.
“The Cuba issue has sharply divided Washington from the rest of the hemisphere for decades, and this move, long overdue, goes a long way towards removing a key major source of irritation in US-Latin American relations,” Shifter said.
Obama also announced Wednesday that he will attend the 2015 Summit of the Americas in Panama in April. Castro had also been officially invited, over the objections of both the US and Canada, at the last Summit in Cartagena in 2012, so there had been some speculation that Obama might boycott the proceedings.
Harvard international relations expert Stephen Walt said he hoped that Wednesday’s announcement portends additional bold moves by Obama on the world stage in his last two years as president despite the control of both houses of Congress by Republicans.
“One may hope that this decision will be followed by renewed efforts to restore full diplomatic relations with even more important countries, most notably Iran,” he told IPS in an email.
“Recognition does not imply endorsing a foreign government’s policies; it simply acknowledges that U.S. interests are almost always well served by regular contact with allies and adversaries alike,” he said.
Administration officials told reporters that Wednesday’s developments were made possible by 18 months of secret talks between senior official from both sides—not unlike those carried out in Oman between the US and Iran prior to their landmark November 2013 agreement with five other world powers on Tehran’s nuclear program.
Officials credited Pope Francis, an Argentine, with a key role in prodding both parties toward an accord.
“The Holy Father wishes to express his warm congratulations for the historic decision taken by the Governments of the United States of America and Cuba to establish diplomatic relations, with the aim of overcoming, in the interest of the citizens of both countries, the difficulties which have marked their recent history,” the Vatican said in a statement Wednesday.
The Vatican’s strong endorsement could mute some of the Republican and Cuban-American criticism of normalization and make it more difficult for Rubio and his colleagues to prevent the establishment of an embassy and appointment of an ambassador, according to some Capitol Hill staff.
Similarly, major US corporations, some of whom, particularly in the agribusiness and consumer goods sectors, have seen major market potential in Cuba, are likely to lobby their allies on the Republican side.
“We deeply believe that an open dialogue and commercial exchange between the US and Cuban private sectors will bring shared benefits, and the steps announced today will go a long way in allowing opportunities for free enterprise to flourish,” said Thomas Donohue, the president of the US Chamber of Commerce in a statement. Donohue headed what he called an unprecedented “exploratory” trip to Cuba earlier this year.
“Congress now has a decision to make,” said Jake Colvin, the vice president for global trade issues at the National Foreign Trade Council, an association of many of the world’s biggest multi-national corporations. “It can either show that politics stops at the water’s edge, or insist that the walls of the Cold War still exist.”
Wednesday’s announcement came in the wake of an extraordinary series of editorials by the New York Times through this autumn in favour of normalization and the lifting of the trade embargo.
In another sign of a fundamental shift here, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose husband Bill took some steps to ease the embargo during his tenure as president, disclosed in her book published last summer that she had urged Obama to “take another look at our embargo. It wasn’t achieving its goals, and it was holding back our broader agenda across Latin America.”
That stance, of course, could alienate some Cuban-American opinion, especially in the critical “swing state” of Florida if Clinton runs in the 2016 election. But recent polls of Cuban-Americans have suggested an important generational change in attitudes toward Cuba and normalization within the Cuban-American community, with the younger generation favoring broader ties with their homeland.
Photo: Alan Gross talks with President Obama onboard a government plane headed back to the US, Dec. 17, 2014. Credit: Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson
]]>by Marsha B. Cohen
Israel is putting up more than its usual security measures for the arrival of an important person, Pope Francis, who will be visiting the Holy Land May 24-26. He’ll be the third pope to visit Jerusalem since the 1967 Six Day War.
The pontiff will begin [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
Israel is putting up more than its usual security measures for the arrival of an important person, Pope Francis, who will be visiting the Holy Land May 24-26. He’ll be the third pope to visit Jerusalem since the 1967 Six Day War.
The pontiff will begin his trip in Jordan on May 24, where he will meet with Syrian war refugees and disabled youth. While there, he will visit a baptism site on the East Bank of the Jordan River; Christians’ most sacred sites were in Jordan between 1948-1967, but are now located in territory claimed by Israel. The next day Francis will meet with leaders of the Palestinian Authority and with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in the West Bank, and conduct Mass at Manger Square, the site of the Church of the Nativity, in the heart of Bethlehem. In the Palestinian territories, painted by the Israelis as a hotbed of terrorism, the Pope will ride in an open car through the streets of Bethlehem.
But on the Israeli side of the border (boundary, barrier, fence, wall or whatever you call it), where Pope Francis will spend one very full day on May 26, Israeli authorities plan to implement and enforce a strict permit regime that will keep the public behind a security cordon, and the Pope inside an armored car. According to Haaretz, Israeli authorities believe these extraordinary security measures are both justified and necessary due to fears of anti-Christian attacks by radical settlers.
The Israeli Police and the Shin Bet domestic security agency — Israel’s FBI — have expressed concern that right-wing extremists might try to exploit Pope Francis’ visit to to carry out a major hate crime targeting Israel’s Christian population and sacred sites throughout the country, to attract media attention. On May 21, the Israel Defense Force and the Shin Bet issued administrative restraining orders against four Jewish extremists until the Pope’s departure.
The Argentine-born Pope plans to hold a Mass at the Cenacle, a thousand-year-old structure at the the top of Mount Zion, just outside the Old City of Jerusalem. Christian tradition reveres one of its upper floors as the setting of the Last Supper, while Jewish and Muslim traditions claim that the ground floor of the building houses the tomb of King David. Although these claims are all anachronistic, the three faiths agree that the site deserves reverence. As Ora Limor observes:
One of the most intriguing phenomena in the study of sacred space and pilgrimage to holy places is how believers of different faiths may share sanctity. Scholars and historians of religion have not infrequently noticed that the nature of a holy place retains its sanctity when it changes hands. Once a site has been recognized as holy, the sanctity adheres to it, irrespective of political and religious vicissitudes.
Jews and Christians haven’t always been willing to share access to Jerusalem’s sacred sites. Jews were not allowed to visit their holy sites in Jerusalem’s Old City when they were under Jordanian control. But the Cenacle — aka David’s Tomb — on Mount Zion, was outside the Old City, and remained on the Israeli side of the “Green Line;” Christians are allowed to visit it, but are not permitted to pray there.
Since 2008, Mount Zion has been attracting “peculiar Haredi [ultra-orthodox] groups, hilltop youths, newly religious Jews and converts often motivated by hatred of Christians and Muslims,” Haaretz reports. Increasingly brutal attacks resulting in life-threatening injuries, as well as defacement and firebombing of property owned by non-Jews, have become increasingly commonplace in the past several months. Students at the Diaspora Yeshiva, which has acquired control of many of the buildings surrounding David’s Tomb, are suspected of being among the perpetrators of violence against Christians and their churches:
The attacks have included vandalism, cemetery desecration, car arson and rock-throwing, in addition to countless incidents in which monks and Christian clergymen have been spat at and cursed. It seems to be a consensus among Christians in the area that people affiliated with the Diaspora Yeshiva are to blame.
The head of the Yeshiva, Rabbi Yitzchak Goldstein, denies the charges against his students. Nevertheless, Goldstein was the organizer of a demonstration against the Pope’s visit by 200 ultra-orthodox Jews on May 12. More protests are planned for May 22.
Neoconservative media tend to depict Israel’s Christian population as looking to the Jewish state to secure their safety against their increasingly restive Muslim neighbors. Its 158,000 Christians, 80% of whom are Arab, constitute just 2% of Israel’s total population of 8.1 million. In fact, Christians are concerned about the upsurge in acts of vandalism targeting their institutions and sacred sites carried out by extremist Jews. In his 2013 Christmas message, Jerusalem’s Latin patriarch asserted that twenty Christian sites had been desecrated in the past year. In January, Hebrew graffiti was spray-painted on the walls of the Notre Dame of Jerusalem Center calling for the expulsion of Christians from Israel’s sacred soil. The Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation reported:
The shock over the incident has prompted the Christian community in Jerusalem to protest strongly, not for the first time, denouncing these acts that reveal a deeper problem that concerns Israeli society in general and Jerusalem in particular; and which seriously calls into question religious tolerance within the society that encompasses the State of Israel, which cannot manage to prevent this type of religious intolerance.
At the end of April, just a few days after the publication of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s warning that Israel was in danger of becoming an “apartheid state,” the section of the State Department’s 2013 Country Reports on Terrorism dealing with Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza drew attention to the growing threat posed by “extremist Israeli settlers.” It cited “399 attacks by extremist Israeli settlers that resulted in Palestinian injuries or property damage” and deemed them “violent extremists” — mostly over “price tag” attacks against Palestinian Arab homes and property. “Price tag” is a code-term used by Jewish extremists to justify what they claim are retaliatory actions against Arabs or proposed policies of the Israeli government — policies that would restrict the expansion of settlements in “Judea and Samaria,” the preferred settler term for the occupied territories in the West Bank. “Price tag” has been appearing prominently in the Hebrew graffiti defacing Christian sites.
In the weeks prior to the Pope’s visit, there has been a spike in hate crimes carried out by Jewish extremists against Christians. According to Haaretz:
The various police districts were instructed by authorities to focus their operational and intelligence efforts on the Christian population and its institutions, and to consolidate extra security in these communities until the end of the visit. The police was also asked to increase its security assessments of the right-wing extremists in their various districts, with particular emphasis on holy sites.
Fueling the present wave of Jewish extremist violence against Christians have been rumors that the Israeli government plans to cede control over David’s Tomb to the Church. In February, Giulio Meotti, an Italian journalist for Il Foglio who also writes for the Israeli religious nationalist news site, Arutz Sheva, claimed an arrangement had been reached in which the Israeli government would not only grant the Pope access to the site of the Last Supper for his Mass and allow Catholics to use it for daily prayer, but also cede Mount Zion and numerous Christian sites throughout Israel and the West Bank to the Vatican, ultimately leading to the expulsion of Jews from Jerusalem:
Should the Vatican gain sovereignty over Mount of Zion, millions of Christian pilgrims will flock to the site, and this will threaten the Israeli presence in the Old City’s Jewish Quarter and Jewish access to the Western Wall. The Vatican wants the Jews out of the Old City and apparently Israel’s government is agreeing with them. Turning the Cenacle into an active church is also a way of desecrating the holiness of the site known as the Tomb of David.
In an interview with the Catholic website Patheos, Cecilia Lakin, an attorney from Detroit who is in Jerusalem awaiting the Pope’s arrival, characterized the protesters as “a small but noisy group” who reminded her of the Westboro Baptist Church, and pose no threat to the pope’s safety. Most Israelis with whom she said she had spoken with regarded them as “annoying but harmless troublemakers,” and dismissed them with a yawn.
But a senior adviser to the Catholic Church, Wadi Abu Nassar, told Haaretz that church officials had been warning about the escalation of hate crimes by extremist Jews against Christians. If Israeli authorities do not address the problem, Israel’s standing in the international community would be damaged. “We’re already in an atmosphere of terror,” he said.
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