Life is never easy growing up in a refugee camp. It is a life of poverty, limited access to education, lack of access to sporting or recreational facilities and few opportunities. Hopelessness and despair abound. This is a reality that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have known as their childhood for the past 60 years.

The Obama administration’s bank bailout may work to save the major banking institutions. But there are two problems. One is that there is no reason why we should have, over the next several decades, all the big banks we now have. We don’t need, and won’t need, a banking system as large as we have had for the last couple of decades.

It was after the Cold War that the Indian establishment’s attitude to Palestine could not escape the impact of the overall lurch rightwards of the centre of gravity of the Indian polity. At home this has meant much greater accommodation towards— and acceptance of— Hindutva, which applauds Zionism.

The New Great Game is not only focused on the face-off between the United States and its strategic competitors Russia and China, with Pipeline-istan as a defining element. The Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine instead requires the control of the Pentagon-coined “arc of instability” from the Horn of Africa to western China. The cover story is the former “global war on terror,” now "overseas contingency operations" under the management of President Barack Obama’s administration.

On the 3rd of December 1984, 40 tonnes of toxic gases escaped from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. The result was catastrophic. 3,000 people— men, women, and children— were dead within the hour; after 72 hours the death toll had tripled. Over 22,000 have died to date from gas-related afflictions, and permanent injuries run into the hundreds of thousands.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe the horse was lost. For want of a horse the rider was lost. For want of a rider the battle was lost. For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.

“We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the era of impunity,” Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, was quoted by IPS in response to the findings of a 574-page report by a four-member United Nations Fact finding mission.

While the Obama administration was careful to distance itself from the recent coup in Honduras — condemning the expulsion of President Manuel Zelaya to Costa Rica, revoking Honduran officials’ visas, and shutting off aid — that doesn’t mean influential Americans aren’t involved, and that both sides of the aisle don’t have some explaining to do.

The AIJ’s MR Wiseman recently summoned the ghosts of bards-past to wax poetic with Remi Kanazi, editor of Poets For Palestine (Al Jisser, 2008), a collection of old- and new-school poetry and artwork for, you guessed it, Palestine.

It is a relief to have a new Administration, to be at the start of a new government rather than at the end of one, and to have a President with the talent of President Obama and with the public confidence that he presently enjoys. That said, there is a real question as to whether this opportunity will be used in a way that makes for an effective course of action in the time during which the window of opportunity will be open.