Alex Kane: Obama Ignores the Ugly, Brutal Reality of

Occupation and Colonization on his Israel Trip. Round after round of tear gas, was shot by a group of Israeli soldiers on a hill overlooking a protest of about 100 Palestinians, in support of a hunger striking prisoner. The smell of rubber tires filled the air, and the fired tear gas made protester's eyes water, as they ran back on a road in the central West Bank town of Beitunia after throwing stones at the soldiers. The demonstrators, most of them young, were there to show their support for Samer Issawi, a Palestinian prisoner, reportedly close to death, after being on hunger strike for well over 200 days, in protest of being held in jail on secret evidence. Issawi's hearing was scheduled to be held at Ofer prison, in the occupied West Bank on March 21, but he was too sick to show up. Hunger striking prisoners, angry youth protesters, living under a nearly 46 year old grinding occupation, and tear gas, and rubber bullets  fired at abandon, that injure and maim Palestinians, this was the part of occupied Palestinian life, that President Obama avoided. The president arrived in Israel on March 20, and promptly set the tenor of his trip, by giving a speech at Ben Gurion Airport, that did not mention the word Palestine or Palestinian. While he did eventually speak of the indignities Palestinians suffer under occupation, during his big speech in Jerusalem, to Israeli youth on March 21, the words, for many Palestinians, rung hollow. Barack Obama's visit skirted the reality of what occupation, and an institutionalized set of unequal rules, based on ethnicity, means to ordinary Palestinians living within Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. The big Obama visit to Israel, his first as a sitting president, cemented the unbreakable alliance, as the official slogan for his trip "put it", between the US and Israel, an alliance that comes at the expense of the human rights of Palestinians. The scene at Ben-Gurion Airport, as Obama first arrived, was a sign of things to come. Israeli and American flags, waved everywhere you went. An Israeli military band launched into a song, that said a lot about the trip. The song, "Jerusalem of Gold" echoed through the air, a tune that celebrates the so called unification of Jerusalem under exclusive Israeli rule, a unification that has meant expulsion, and illegal settlements, for the Palestinians, living in what Israel considers its capital, though the international community has not recognized the Israeli annexation.