While cruising in South America last month, I happened to pick on board the ship’s minuscule edition of The New York Times and, much to my surprise, it had the news about the ordeal of Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr., who felt duty bound to withdraw his nomination as chairman of the National Intelligence Council in the wake of a brutal and unjustified attack by the pro-Israel lobby.

The news coincided with my reading of Aaron David Miller’s wonderful book, “The Much Too Promised Land”, detailing his years at the State Department where he was one of the so-called “Jewish lawyers” - Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Dan Kurtzer and Richard Haass - handling the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations undertaken by several US administrations.

The Freeman debacle reminded me of my experience at a major US newspaper where I worked for nearly two years thanks to the effort of a Jewish colleague who was aware of my journalistic background in Beirut, Lebanon and the US at another paper in Chicago. After working there for a few weeks, I asked my friend whether I could move to the opinion section, where he served as deputy editor, from the foreign desk. He looked at me quizzically, but sheepishly, and said that it would be difficult since I was Palestinian. There were two other incidents where my heritage seemingly posed a problem. Shortly thereafter I left the paper, fearing that my days there would be numbered.

“Concern for Israel’s well being had become part of me,” wrote Miller in his book, “like some sort of ethnic DNA.”

He also noted that “far too often the small group with whom I had worked in the Clinton administration, myself included, had acted as a lawyer for only one side, Israel”.

Well, if that is the case, why can’t someone like Freeman, a former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia and China who in fact is Jewish, serve his country as he did for three decades and help provide intelligence briefings to President Obama?

Freeman was correct in suspecting that his nomination (which did not need confirmation by Congress) as a top intelligence analyst “won’t be final until the fat lady at AIPAC sighs”, a reference to the pro-Israel lobby, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

All Freeman has done in recent years, after his retirement from the Foreign Service, was to underline “the suicidal character of Israeli policy”. In Freeman’s words, “the aim of this lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those it favours.”

He continued: “The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues.”

Indeed it has. The Blogosphere, and regrettably not the media, attested to that in the countless commentaries in support of Freeman. The fact that Freeman’s “character assassination” was triggered in a blog by a rogue ex-AIPAC, Steven Rosen, who is awaiting trial on espionage charges for passing secrets to Israel, has infuriated many.

On the other hand, the failure of the Obama administration to come to Freeman’s defence has been disappointing, especially that it came as international criticism of the Israeli army’s atrocious conduct during its 23-day invasion of Gaza has been mounting.

A recent report detailing several Israeli abuses and presented to the UN Human Rights Council revealed that an 11-year-old Palestinian boy was used by Israeli soldiers as a human shield.

“To do this,” wrote Gideon Levy of the Israeli paper Haaretz, “without any unnecessary moral qualms, [shows that] we have trained our soldiers to think that the lives and property of Palestinians have no value whatsoever. It is part of a process of dehumanisation that has endured for dozens of years, the fruits of the occupation [of Palestinian territory].”

The ball remains in Obama’s court; whether he can do something about it remains to be seen. To his credit, he did recognise last Tuesday that the current situation is “unsustainable” now that a far-right Israeli government is in the making which does not believe in a Palestinian state, as well as because of the bigoted ultra-nationalist foreign minister who would like to kick out of Israel the 1.5-million Arab population.