Three Views Blinken Visits Israel/Palestine Amid Heightened Violence

“There is No Pressure on Israel to Change”: Palestinians Respond to Blinken Visit to Jerusalem

By Mariam Barghouti

ON MONDAY, JAN 30, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Jerusalem and delivered a speech alongside re-elected Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin 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 Jan. 26, which eyewitnesses called a “massacre.” The second was a guerrilla shooting operation undertaken by 21-yearold Khairi Alkam in the illegal Israeli settlement of Neve Yaakov 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 Netanyahu where the Biden official reiterated calls for a twostate 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 adminis- tration is taking on the ground. “The American response was and remains biased toward 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-yearold Palestinian-American who suffered a heart attack as he was being held up by Israeli soldiers in the West Bank last year, were U.S. citizens, and yet the required legal action for holding their killers accountable has not been pursued.

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,” Ghassan Daghlas, Palestinian official and director of monitoring settlement activity in the West Bank, 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 U.S. 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. This includes the Visa Waiver Program which would allow Israeli citizens to enter the United States without prior application for visas.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Tom Nides released a new video in coordination with Blinken’s trip which explained Israeli movement toward 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 saying that U.S. passport holders should 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 U.S. position continues to showcase a discriminatory response toward Palestinians.

As Violence, U.S. Confirms Drone Attacks on Iran

By Steven Simon

SECRETARY OF STATE Antony Blinken arrived in Israel on Jan. 30 for talks with Prime Minister Netanyahu amid dramatic developments, including apparently successful Israeli drone attacks against an Iranian defense installation where Tehran is conducting parts of its ballistic missile program. U.S. officials confirmed that Israel was behind the weekend attacks, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Israeli and U.S. critics of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran had long insisted that without a ban on Iran’s ballistic missile program, the nuclear deal was fatally flawed. Fires and explosions at similar facilities in 2020 and 2021 have been attributed to Israeli sabotage, but unacknowledged by either Israel or the United States. The current strikes differ in both the weaponry used—drones—and in the attribution of the attacks to Israel by U.S. intelligence sources.

Iranian statements and publicly available video imagery indicate the attacks were carried out using commercially available quadcopter drones, which suggests that they were launched from within Iran, rather than, say, Azerbaijan. Regardless of the so-called “launch basket” (the area from which the drones were launched), the attacks could be important for two reasons.

1. They might presage an entirely new military strategy toward Iran’s nuclear facilities, one that does not require an intensive and hazardous air campaign and therefore lowers the costs and risks of escalation and general war. This is the approach Iran took to its highly destructive raid on two Saudi oil installations in 2019. Stay tuned.

2. The Biden administration is apparently ready to acknowledge close cooperation with Israel on military efforts to damage Iran’s nuclear and missile programs.

These points will figure in Blinken’s talks with Netanyahu about the spiraling crisis in the Palestinian arena. In the aftermath of the murder of seven Jewish worshipers emerging from a synagogue in the Neve Yaakov neighborhood in Jerusalem, tensions have spiked. In his first remarks after hitting the tarmac, Blinken offered condemnation for the violence but urged restraint overall.

“We condemn all those who celebrate these and any other acts of terrorism that take civilian lives no matter who the victim is or what they believe,” he said. “Calls for vengeance against more innocent victims are not the answer. And acts of retaliatory violence against civilians are never justified.”

“It is the responsibility of everyone to take steps to calm tensions, rather than to inflame them,” he added. “That is the only way to halt the rising tide of violence that has taken too many lives, too many Israelis, too many Palestinians.”

The new government has placed two ultra-right wing cabinet ministers in charge of security and the West Bank. The massacre challenges them to put their money where their mouth is. For these two ministers, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, it is both a challenge and an opportunity. Their initial response was to order the arrest of 42 relatives and acquaintances of the lone attacker, which looks very much like collective punishment, and approve the demolition of his family’s house.

The latter penalty, framed by government lawyers as a deterrent rather punishment, is one that the Israeli Supreme Court has approved in the past. (It is a vestige of pre–1948 British Mandatory law.) Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority has halted cooperation

Steven Simon is a Senior Analyst at the Quincy Institute and Professor in the Practice of International Relations at Colby College. He is working on a new book, The Long Goodbye: The United States and the Middle East from the Islamic Revolution to the Arab Spring with Israeli authorities, which raises security problems of its own, while Hamas has unreservedly applauded the killings without claiming responsibility.

Blinken will want to persuade Netanyahu to avoid turning this episode into an all-out Israeli-Palestinian war. Given the sharply critical response of Israel’s business community to his government’s plan to subordinate the judiciary to parliament, Netanyahu undoubtedly knows that his government is navigating dangerous shoals. He is well-connected to leaders in this economic sector, who have warned of capital flight and a downgrading of Israel’s credit rating.

This is hardly his first rodeo. Netanyahu’s previous stints as prime minister were marred by crises in Israel’s long-running conflict with Palestinians, and he has generally backed off from Armageddon scenarios. The Biden administration has been in constant contact with Netanyahu since his government took office, no doubt reminding him that the United States welcomed his insistence on his ability to corral his cabinet and will expect him to back words with action.

More pointedly, against the backdrop of the drone attacks, Iranian support for Russian aggression in Ukraine and brutal suppression of protestors at home, Blinken will remind Netanyahu that dealing with Iran’s nuclear program is a strategic imperative for both the United States and Israel. Events, he will probably observe, have never been as favorable to this cause as they are now. He will caution Netanyahu not to undermine bilateral efforts to disarm Iran to accommodate his ultra-right wing coalition partners.

For Netanyahu, the Biden administration’s portrayal of him as the adult in the room holds promise and peril. The promise lies in his rehabilitation as the shrewd and responsible steward of Israel’s most important partner. His reputation on this score had been shredded by his alienation of Barack Obama. He can now re-burnish his credentials. Given his posture as Israel’s savior against an Iranian existential threat and his reliance on U.S. support to infuse this posture with a semblance of reality, he will not want to drive a Palestinian wedge between the United States and Israel.

On the other hand, his exceptionally strong majority in the Knesset, the basis of his political power—and the shield against a possible prison term—hinges on the loyalty of radical parties with vocal constituencies. And they are notably indifferent to the United States and to Netanyahu’s broader objectives. Netanyahu could offer the center and center-left parties now in the opposition the chance to replace his nettlesome current coalition partners, but experience shows that the resulting government would be extremely unstable.

Blinken’s Israel visit therefore is an important event. It has the potential to restore Netanyahu to grace and even open the possibility of an invitation to the White House, by a president, who, as vice president, was described by a prominent Israeli commentator as having to “wipe [Netanyahu’s] spit off his face” and “say it was only rain,” or be relegated once again to bilateral diplomatic purgatory.

Palestinians inspect an olive field on Jan. 1, 2023, after Israeli settlers uprooted trees in the village of Aqraba, south of Nablus, in the occupied West Bank. Settlers also burned seven cars belonging to Palestinians and destroyed property in the village of Aqraba, after a Palestinian’s shooting attack in Jerusalem. Settlers carried out more than 144 attacks against Palestinians in one evening.

The PA has reservations about the plan, which does not include any demands for Israel to reduce the number of its incursions across the West Bank. Moreover, Abbas has blamed Israel and the “lack of international efforts to dismantle the occupation” for the escalation.