The Biden administration is concerned about Israel’s far-right government only as much as it impedes U.S. foreign policy. When it comes to the Palestinians, the U.S. simply doesn’t care.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken visited Israel and things went exactly as one might expect. There were the usual public comments about the Biden administration’s ironclad support for the country, the standard denunciations of Palestine violence paired with tepid criticisms of Israeli state violence, and (of course) some references to the two-state solution. However, the context of the trip makes the same old song and dance seem a bit more ridiculous.

Last week the State Department refused to admit that Israel is occupying the West Bank or that the country has nuclear weapons.

Steve Inskeep of NPR today described Neve Yaakov, the scene of an attack last week, as being in Israel. While Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street called it a Jerusalem “neighborhood.” It is in fact an exclusively Jewish settlement in occupied Jerusalem, built on confiscated Palestinian lands, and a source of affliction for Palestinians.

Speaking from Jerusalem following a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken reiterated calls for a two-state solution and promoting the normalization of relations with Israel across the Middle East. Palestinians say the visit shows the United States remains biased towards Israel.

“When the U.S. draws an equivalence between the butcher and the butchered, then it is necessarily on the side of the butcher,” Ubai Aboudi, Executive Director at Bisan Center for Research and Development, tells Mondoweiss.

Yesterday in a shocking exchange at the State Department, the spokesman for Biden’s foreign policy team refused to describe Palestinians in Jenin and other areas of the West Bank as living under military occupation by Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical rightwing ministers’ agenda is the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. And yet high Biden officials are meeting with Netanyahu today, and Secretary Blinken is due out within a couple of weeks, all to give Biden’s blessing to the new government — and perform what the State Department admitted yesterday is “triage” on the failure of the two-state solution.

Al Jazeera is submitting a case to the International Criminal Court over the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. Not surprisingly, the Biden administration doesn’t support it.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken made it clear the Biden administration is no friend to even J Street’s moderate politics on Israel, let alone the broader struggle for Palestinian rights. 

A draconian set of rules and restrictions on the entry of foreigners into the occupied West Bank have gone into effect today, despite months of condemnations by rights groups and legal efforts to stop the restrictions from being enforced. 

“It of course comes down to demographic considerations,” Israeli attorney Yotam Ben Hillel explains. “These new restrictions will completely isolate Palestinian society.”