President-elect Barack Obama plays a little golf during his vacation last week in Hawaii. Al Jazeera contrasted footage of Obama on vacation with scenes of the carnage in Gaza, noting what it called "the deafening silence of the Obama team." (Tim Sloan / Getty-AFP / December 29, 2008)

Israeli ground troops have started to enter the Gaza Strip, Israeli military officials have confirmed, a week after the offensive against Hamas began.(...) Earlier, Israel intensified air and artillery attacks on the territory. (...) The UN has warned of a worsening humanitarian crisis, and believes 25% of more than 400 Palestinians killed by Israel so far were civilians.(...) there are said to be some 10,000 Israeli troops and hundreds of tanks massed on the border with Gaza. The office of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has also announced that the government has ordered the urgent call-up of "tens of thousands" of extra military reservists. BBC News

"We want him to say something at least to stop the bloodshed," said Suhail Natour, a Palestinian activist who lives in the Mar Elias Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. "Waiting until the 20th, with the bloodshed continuing, I don't think is an acceptable way of confirming a new policy in the Middle East. Silence on this means complicity." Chicago Tribune

Readers of mine will know that I am no fan of Barack Obama's, but I confess that I never expected him to prove me right by defining himself so quickly... even before being sworn in as President.

What is happening in Gaza is huge, grotesquely tragic... It is like watching a cat play with a small animal before killing it... endlessly mauling it... warming to its work.

People all over the world have placed great hopes in Barack Obama and his "yes we can - change we can believe in" and they are waiting for a word... only a word... and while people are dying horribly, he is playing golf.

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A very wise man once said that there are only two kinds of people in the world: those that think that there are only two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.

The readiness to quickly divide the world into "us" and "them": this need to stimulate tribalism, is at the heart of right wing populism and the only difference between right wing populism and fascism is the degree of organized violence that they finally produce.

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We live now in a curious, "lull before the storm", interlude. What seemed normal only a few months ago, now seems strange, silly and sinister. Those who were thought to be wise have been shown to be fools and what seemed granite fortresses have turned out to be so many cobweb constructions.

More is on the way: new myths to be exploded and new fools to be exposed. We call this a crisis.

A crisis in our system -- more a momentary interruption of its smugness -- at least holds out the opportunity to question what we are doing and why we are doing it.

For reasons of financial esoterica, reasons that are very complex and difficult to follow even for those trained to understand them, millions of people are going to face real hardship and many others in the economic twilight of the third world will literally starve to death or die of untreated diseases. We seem to have woven ourselves into some kind of hell.

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"Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres" (tell me who hang out with and I'll tell you who you are) Old Spanish proverb

'Twas an evening in October, I'll confess I wasn't sober,
I was carting home a load with manly pride,
When my feet began to stutter and I fell into the gutter,
And a pig came up and lay down by my side.
Then I lay there in the gutter, thinking thoughts I cannot utter,
Till a lady, passing by, did chance to say:
"You can tell a man that boozes by the company he chooses,"
Then the pig got up and slowly walked away.
"The Pig Got Up and Slowly walked Away" (1933, Clarke Van Ness, music by F. Henri Klickmann)

Anyone eager for change they can believe in would do well to listen closely to the statements and perhaps more importantly to the silences of Barack Obama in the next few days.

As the Spanish proverb and the song quoted above suggest, the United States is defined by the company it keeps. America's conjoined twin alliance with Israel defines America for the world. No amount of chanting "yes we can", will change this. Only a genuine change in policy will change it.

Will there ever be any change?

If you believe that Barack Obama will face down the Israel lobby while trying to pull the USA out of a recession that is quickly turning into a depression, then your hope passes all audacity and enters into that part of the human psyche where suicide bombers expect 72 virgins on completing their assignment.

Richard Nixon once warned, in very different circumstance, that America was in danger of becoming "a pitiful and helpless giant". Nothing conveys this helplessness more graphically than America's supine support for Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people... but very few people pity the "helpless giant" today... if they ever did.
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Amira Hass in perhaps the world's finest, living journalist. Her report from Gaza, published in today's Haaretz is a must read. Here are some excerpts:

There are many corpses and wounded, every moment another casualty is added to the list of the dead, and there is no more room in the morgue. Relatives search among the bodies and the wounded in order to bring the dead quickly to burial. A mother whose three school-age children were killed, and are piled one on top of the other in the morgue, screams and then cries, screams again and then is silent.(...) Dr. Haidar Eid is a lecturer in Cultural Studies at Al-Aqsa University. He, too, saw the bodies and the wounded on Saturday. Also the children whose limbs had been amputated. "To pick a time like this, 11:30 [A.M.], to bomb in the hearts of cities, this is terrible. This choice was intended to cause as large a massacre as possible," he summed up.(...) From 11:25 until 11:30, as some 50 warplanes bombed their targets, hundreds of thousands of children were in the streets. Some were coming from the first shift of classes, others were going to the second. "In the schoolyard I saw 500 frightened girls, crying. They did not know me, but clung to me," Abu Muhammad related.(...) "There's been no electricity, nor gas, nor flour or bread nearly all of the past week," Umm Salah said. "And suddenly the electricity came back. I turned on the television, I saw the images, I turned it off and sent the kids to do their homework."