The U.S. has, since Harry Truman, abandoned the Palestinians to ethnic cleansing.

President Barack Obama’s argument Sept. 21 at the United Nations against U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state is, for me, doubly intolerable.

As a native southerner still shamed by my blindness to racism before going off to Notre Dame, I have no tolerance for racism. The Zionist enterprise has been racist from its inception in its determination to establish a Jewish ethnocracy in Palestine by forcibly replacing its overwhelmingly Arab population.

I am no more tolerant of sophistry, whether the Vatican’s arguments for opposing artificial contraception and the ordination of women or Obama’s insistence that only negotiations in which Israel pays no price for intransigence can occasion a Palestinian state.

In reality, the United States has, since Harry Truman abandoned the Palestinians to ethnic cleansing in the interest of re-election, regularly held that Israel has no claim to any part of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, while regularly funding and abetting its theft of land and water beyond the Green Line and blocking every U.N. effort to secure Palestinians’ human dignity, rights and freedom.

After promising a just resolution, Obama swallowed Binyamin Netanyahu’s arrogant dismissals of requests to stop settlement construction in occupied territories the international community partitioned for a predominantly Palestinian state. He has apparently not mentioned Israel’s doubling of Palestinian home demolitions this year.

Instead of halting aid and supporting U.N. sanctions, Obama continues insisting on asymmetrical negotiations: Nothing would oblige the colonizing thief of much of East Jerusalem and half of the West Bank to give up anything and the colonized Palestinians, powerless, are asked to compromise away a viable state for isolated bantustans in recognition of illegal “demographic trends” (settlements).

Obama’s and Netanyahu’s lame racist argument is that of longtime U.S. negotiator and former AIPAC operative Dennis Ross: “Israeli needs against Palestinian wants.” At the U.N., Obama focused on Israeli security — without even a word for the altogether insecure Palestinians who have suffered many times Israel’s dead and wounded.

Development of far-reaching rocketry and Israel’s fourth-most powerful military with enough nuclear weapons to destroy every Arab country and a readiness to do so have long since erased any importance of Israeli defenses on the Jordan rather than the Green Line. Ignored is Palestinians’ “want ”— the largely contiguous 22 percent of Palestine left after Israel took half of what the U.N. partitioned for a predominantly Palestinian state in 1947-48.

Given Israeli intransigence and inhuman occupation, an inexplicable U.S. veto of U.N. recognition of a Palestinian state, allowing it some parity and access to the International Court of Justice, signals an end to the bogus “peace process” of which we have been the ever-dishonest broker.

One absurdity of that sham has been Washington’s embrace of Israel’s pre-condition that Palestinians recognize Israel’s right to exist. Since Israel will not identify its eastern border, this could mean recognition of Israel’s right to cannibalize all of Palestine. It certainly means Palestinian recognition that Israel had a right to be partitioned from a majority-Arab Palestine, contrary to U.N. principles; a right to steal the land and homes of more than 700,000 ethnically cleansed Palestinians; a right to take over half of what was left for an Arab-majority state; and a right to what parts of the remaining 22 percent it refuses to vacate. Could any self-respecting Palestinian agree that colonial settlers have a right to dispossess them?

Where, then, are we?

Given the omnipresence of naked power today, the Palestinians may never have a state, though universally recognized as deserving one — including by 69 percent of Israelis. And U.N. recognition at the request of unelected Palestinian leadership could well compromise the refugee Palestinian majority’s rights and future Palestinian governance.

Whatever, as longtime Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk observes, the days of the Arabs clicking their heels to American dictation are over. U.S. empire has failed, and our sacrifice of justice, Palestinians’ human dignity, and our respect in the community of nations to Israel’s arrogant racism has neutered American political power in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, abysmally ignorant Republican candidates mouth absolute fealty to Israel and Congress threatens to punish the long-oppressed Palestinians for their impatient presumption — as if the oil-rich sheikdoms will not have the last say, as OPEC did in the 1970s, sending Western economies into another tailspin.

Hope remains — a burgeoning nonviolent Palestinian resistance; the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, and increasing world impatience with racist Israeli brutality.

William H. Slavick is a retired University of Southern Maine professor. He has written extensively on peace issues. He lives in Portland.