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“There is no pressure on Israel to change”: Palestinians respond to Blinken visit to Jerusalem

Palestinians say Antony Blinken's statements in Jerusalem show the U.S. remains biased. “When the US draws an equivalence between the butcher and the butchered, then it is necessarily on the side of the butcher,” says Ubai Aboudi.

On Monday, January 30, United States Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrived in Jerusalem and delivered a speech alongside the re-elected Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The arrival of the secretary of state comes amid two landmark moments that took place last week. The first was the killing of 10 Palestinians during an Israeli army invasion of the Jenin refugee camp on January 26, which eyewitnesses called a “massacre.” The second was a guerrilla shooting operation undertaken by 21-year-old Khairi Alkam in the illegal Israeli settlement of Neve Yaacov located in East Jerusalem, where six Israeli settlers and one Ukrainian national were killed. 

“We want to make sure that there’s an environment in which we can…create the conditions where we can start to restore a sense of security for Israelis and Palestinians alike,” the secretary of state affirmed at a press conference following a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu where the Biden official reiterated calls for a two-state solution. 

For Palestinians, the surge in Israeli attacks on Palestinians is making any restoration of security seem impossible, and Blinken’s message only reflected the biased approach the Biden Administration is taking on the ground. “The American response was and remains biased towards the occupation,” Ubai Aboudi, Executive Director at Bisan Center for Research and Development, told Mondoweiss.

“When the U.S. draws an equivalence between the butcher and the butchered, then it is necessarily on the side of the butcher,” Aboudi said.

“We are still waiting on the issue of Shireen [Abu Akleh], and we doubt there has been accountability on the issue of assassinating a well-known journalist who is also an American citizen, likewise in the case of Omar Assad,” Aboudi said, recalling the slain Palestinian-Americans killed last year along with 230 others.

Abu Akleh and Assad, an 80-year-old Palestinian-American who suffered a heart attack as he was being held up by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank last year, were American citizens, and yet neither received the required legal action for holding their killers accountable.

Blinken also heralded the normalization efforts of the Biden and Trump administrations to increase Israeli diplomatic, military, and economic ties across the region.

“As we advance Israel’s integration,” the secretary of state said, “we can do so in ways that improve the daily lives of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.” 

Many Palestinians are still waiting for the Biden administration to overturn several of the policies of the Trump administration, including moving the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The continuity between U.S. administrations only furthers the view that American foreign policy supports strengthened and sustained Israeli settler expansion and violence.

“Blinken’s message is clear in its highlight,” Palestinian official and director of monitoring settlement activity in the West Bank, Ghassan Daghlas, told Mondoweiss. “There is no pressure on Israel to change its practices.” 

While some thought the inauguration of the new far-right Israeli government would shift U.S. policy, Blinken’s visit would seem to indicate it will not.

“The US may have a perspective on the form of the Israeli government,” Daghlas noted about the new Israeli government, “but that’s internal [Israeli] issues which do not speak to Palestinians and their rights.” 

One other focus of the trip is to increase bilateral relations between the United States and Israel, of which includes the Visa Waiver program which would allow Israeli citizens to enter the USA without prior application for visas. 

The US ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, released a new video in coordination with Blinken’s trip which explained Israeli movement towards joining the visa waiver program. Nides concluded his message on a note which signals a unified American-Israeli fraternity “as we like to say at the embassy, Blue is Blue.” 

The ambassador did make a point of American passport holders to also be able to travel freely to Israel, “including Palestinian-Americans” but only as American passport holders. 

Yet, even in the case of citizenship security, the American position continues to showcase a discriminatory response towards Palestinians. 

Blinken is scheduled to meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday. 

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How can Israel be expected to honor the visa waiver program requirements, when it wouldn’t even allow two elected US members of Congress to enter Israel or the West Bank?

The very same guy that personally blocked them from traveling to Israel, is back in the Prime Minister’s Office. He’s never apologized, he’s never been made to answer for his despicable actions, and our officials are yet again pretending like nothing ever happened, and are bending over backwards to accommodate Israel. Despite their every intention to violate the agreement before the ink is even dry. It’s the Israeli way, “you do what we want, and we get to do what we want (or don’t want) in return”.

It is yet another US Secretary of State, making an urgent visit to yet another violent flare up in the Middle East, once again between an apartheid nation that continues to thumb its nose at the world, and keeps occupying, stealing lands (quoting an old, old book that they do not believe in, and that no international court will recognize), and killing unarmed civilians who are then called “militants”,”terrorists, even “beasts”, and the long suffering occupied people, that are fighting and struggling for freedom and basic human rights, which the US is supporting and fighting for in Ukraine, but not for those occupied for over 50 years.
You get this feeling of deja vu.
A feeling that we are going around in circles, that never ends.

We see the photo ops of a smiling Bibi and a US Sec. of State, smiling back like good buddies, and you have to wonder why they keep pretending that things will be different, or that THIS time the US will be able to achieve that miracle – the 2 State Solution, that has now become a joke, and well known it will never, ever materialize, the US knows it, but pretends otherwise.

Why would we keep funding this apartheid rogue nation, that has the most UN resolution against it, including MANY human rights violations? Israel’s crooked PM has openly stated there will be NO 2SS when he is in power, so why does the US keep pretending it is close at hand, when it reality Israel is bull sh***ing the world, and wants something entirely different? Their greed will never end, and their brutality gets worse by the day. America’s top charity recipient giving the finger once again to the country that has funded their crimes against humanity, and we keep pretending they are going to reform this time.

Sickening. The usual meaningless blah, blah, blah from the Yanx.

Some of us know last President to play hardball with Israel’s continued expansion and building of ILLEGAL settlements in West Bank, confiscation of Palestinian homes land etc was Republican President Bush and Secretary of State Baker. They took some serious actions. Publicly criticizing Israel and linking U.S. foreign aid to Israel threatened by their continued defiance of international agreements etc.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2537981

https://ips-dc.org/the_bush_administration_the_israeli…/

https://www.wrmea.org/…/a-war-on-four-fronts-the-bush..
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We will not be witnessing President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken playing hardball with Israel under this administration the White House is Israeli occupied territory, as it was under Trump.el

International reports verifying Israel is an apartheid state. Those facts getting out.

The only way the Palestinians can ever expect to receive equal treatment from the Biden Administration is by providing it with at least as much money as it receives from Israel first donors. In other words — It aint going to happen.