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President-elect Barack Obama hasn’t even been sworn in yet, and already he’s double-crossed his supporters?

Memo to Obama: You won most of the Democratic primaries. You got most of your party’s delegates at your party’s convention. You were your party’s nominee for president, and you won the general election. If people wanted Sen. Hillary Clinton, they’d have voted for her.

But they voted for you. So what do you do as one of your first acts? Why, pick Rep. Rahm Emanuel as your chief of staff.

Emanuel, before he was elected to Congress, worked in President Clinton’s White House. He was known for his brusque style. Some have described him in terms that BlackAmericaWeb.com editors will no doubt NOT print in this column.

But Emanuel’s personal style is beside the point. His passionate pro-Israel position, as well as his devotion to a president who was every bit as committed to war in Iraq as President Bush was, raises some troubling questions about Obama’s professed commitment to Middle East peace and withdrawal from Iraq.

Throughout the campaign, I was bothered by Obama’s position on the state of Israel. It was basically the same as every Democratic candidate before him, and the same as McCain’s: Unconditional, unqualified support for Israel, no matter what that country does in the Middle East.

Whether you are fervently pro-Israel or fanatically anti-Israel is beside the point in this discussion. I lean toward being pro-Israel, but even I can see how supporting a country that is now in its 41st year of militarily occupying another country can be, at best, problematic. Is there no American president with the guts to tell the Israelis that, for their own benefit and for a lasting peace in the Middle East, they need to withdraw from the Arab lands they seized in the 1967 Six Day War?

That president is apparently not Obama. And with Emanuel as his chief of staff and, by implication, advisor on matters related to Israel, it’s not likely Obama’s position will change any time soon.

To his credit, Emanuel did try to make amends with Arab-Americans after his father was accused of making disparaging remarks about Palestinians. Emanuel issued this quote about the incident, noted on a New York Times blog: “Today, Representative Emanuel called Mary Rose Oakar, president of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, apologized on behalf of his family and offered to meet with representatives of the Arab-American community at an appropriate time in the future.”

I’d imagine Emanuel and those representatives might have much to discuss, specifically his father’s membership in the Irgun, a Jewish group that has been accused of using terror tactics to “ethnically cleanse” certain parts of Palestine of Arabs during the 1948 war.

Palestinian-American writer Ali Abunimah, writing on the wallwritings Web site, said that “Emanuel - whose father fought with the Irgun, the pre-state Jewish militia that carried out terrorist attacks on Palestinians and the British in the 1940s - has a hawkishly pro-Israel record. He has never publicly distanced himself from his father’s contribution to the dispossession of more than 750,000 Palestinians, nor criticized Israel’s frequent attacks on Palestinian communities that have killed and maimed thousands of civilians.”

While that may be justified criticism of Emanuel, it also applies to Obama - and his Republican opponent in the general election and his Democratic one in the primaries. If anyone has a quote from Obama, Hillary Clinton or McCain .....

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