When the American diplomats fear the lobby

How do you make the transfer from outsider to insider, from critic to advocate? Ask Samantha Power who, at 43, is the youngest, not to mention the most engaged, ambassador in American history to represent the US at the United Nations.
A former scholar, human rights champion and writer, who authored the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, she moved last year from the sanctum of President Obama’s National Security Council — where she reportedly was “the eyes, the ears and the conscience of the White House” — to her new post in New York, there to discover, as she put it, “how complicated these things become once you’re in government.” For once you become a public official, and a high-profile one to boot, you learn the art, or the rite, of how to take refugee in the opaque stance, the circumspect comment.
Since its completion in 1952, that tall glass building towering above the East River in Manhattan has been an illusory citadel of good intentions and high-minded hopes, but it is the only place on earth where representatives of the international community gather to hammer out as close a collective voice as they could, and where big powers seek to regroup the world in response to their strategic interests — and the United States is no different. Thus, whom the White House nominates, and Congress confirms, as America’s ambassador there has always been of great import.
And never before had an appointment for that post been more dicey than that of Samantha Power. Ms Power was not just different, she was, well, controversial — not for her views on human rights or the need by her country, putative “leader of the free world,” to take responsibility for dealing with genocide, but for her views on the question of Palestine. After all, this is America, you don’t tolerate an official representing the United States before the international community who had gone on record for telling it like it is when it came to Israeli practices. In government you tone down those views — that is the name of the game — though you may still privately harbor them.
And the all-powerful Israeli lobby doesn’t like that one bit. Even the thoughts you harbor to yourself are watched over by that lobby, lest they are verbalized in public. Even the ideas you may have articulated as a nameless, faceless undergraduate student, let alone the ones you expressed in later years in your books, are dug up and thrown in your face in order to discredit you. And, yes, the feisty Irish American Samantha had not been known to palaver with Israel, but instead to take it on when it came to that entity’s acts of violence, for which she used the right moniker — war crimes.
Clearly, as a diplomat, you are enjoined by your position against verbalizing these sentiments, but who said you can’t evince them in your thoughts? Or your body language? Consider in this regard the Security Council debate on July 22, covered by C-Span, when the UN Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative gave a moving intervention about the horrors inflicted on civilians, especially children, in Gaza by Israeli forces. Half way through it, the camera zoomed in on Ms Power: her face was contorted with what appeared to be a mixture of pain, sympathy and understanding. No, I do not believe that I was imagining that look, nor do I believe the look was affected. Rather, I’m convinced that, as an Irish American (who was born in Ireland and arrived as a youngster still sporting a heavy Dublin accent) she saw an echo of her own ancestors’ gut-wrenching history there, of famine, colonialism, exploitation and unspeakable suffering.
Ms Power had written at one time: “There’s nothing wrong with alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial importance [pressure groups in the US that support Israel] and sacrificing billions of dollars, not servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the state of Palestine.” She took the New York Time to task in 2002 when that newspaper of record reported that no massacres took place in Jenin that year. And in a 2007 interview posted on the Harvard Kennedy School of Government website, Ms Power said: “America’s important historic relationship with Israel has often led [our] foreign policy decision-makers to defer reflexively to Israeli security assessments and to replicate Israeli tactics [in Iraq].”
In July last year, days before Power’s confirmation, Sarah Stern, President of the Endowment for Middle East Truth, an unabashed pro-Israel group, said in a statement: “Considering Power’s openly hostile positions on Israel, as well as her deep-seated resentment for the United States, and her biases for the Palestinians ... this appointment shows supporters of Israel that the Obama administration’s worst instincts are coming to the fore in its second term. It’s deeply distressing. We oppose her nomination in the strongest terms possible.”
Holy smoke! How come, you ask, was Samantha Power appointed as US ambassador to the UN in the first place, and how was she able, almost exactly a year after the fact, to remain in her post? Well, hold on to your hats. There’s still time. We all remember what happened to Andy Young, another US ambassador to the UN, who had held similar views about the Palestinians, but did not fare well at the end.
Andy Young, a Georgia-born African American activist, pastor, former mayor and prominent leader in the civil rights movement, was appointed ambassador by President Jimmy Carter in 1977. He lasted all of two years. On July 20, 1979, a time in American Palestinian relations when the US, as per its agreement with Israel, refused to have any dealings with the PLO or any of its officials, Young still secretly met the group’s UN representative, Zehdi Terezi, at the home of Kuwait’s UN ambassador in New York.
On Aug. 10, news of the meeting became public when Mossad leaked the illegally-obtained transcript of the encounter to Newsweek magazine. Young’s ambassadorship ended four days later after President Carter asked for his resignation.