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01-02-2023
WASHINGTON: Even compared with the volatile nature of Israel’s decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories, the last few weeks have been marked by extraordinary tensions and deadly violence between Israelis and 
Palestinians but when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in Israel this week, he only reiterated Washington’s longstanding positions on the conflict: an “ironclad” commitment to Israel, a call for calm, and rhetorical support for the two-state solution.
Almost everything that Blinken said during a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Monday was drawn at times verbatim from previous State Department statements.
George Bisharat, a professor at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, said the US administration views occasional eruptions of violence in Israel-Palestine as “inconveniences to be managed” while maintaining unconditional support for the Israeli government.
“From the United States’ point of view, let’s be real: They don’t give a damn about Palestinian lives,” Bisharat told media.
“They only care to the extent that these flare-ups interfere with what the United States perceives to be its strategic interests in the region, which have nothing to do with human rights of anybody, not just the Palestinians.”
‘Status quo’
Blinken’s visit comes after a Palestinian gunman on Friday fatally shot seven Israelis in occupied East Jerusalem after Israeli forces killed 10 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in one of the deadliest days in recent memory.
Despite the mounting tensions, the US administration is unlikely to change course soon, said Annelle Sheline, a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a US-based think tank.
“The Biden administration policy towards the Middle East in general, and Israel specifically, is premised on maintaining the status quo, and not acknowledging the ways that the status quo is shifting under their feet,” Sheline told media.
“It is long past time for a new approach, but I don’t think we’re likely to see one,” she added.
“I haven’t seen any inclination from anyone in the administration that they’re interested in trying to pressure Israel. I think they worry about the optics of that.”
Although Biden promised to centre human rights in his foreign policy when he took office, his administration has 
pushed to strengthen US support for Israel, which major rights groups have accused of imposing a system of apartheid on Palestinians.
Israel receives $3.8bn in US military aid annually, and Biden increased the assistance by $1bn last year.
Criticizing Israel still enacts a high political cost in the US, experts have pointed out, while President Joe Biden has touted his own ideological stance as a self-proclaimed Zionist.
Meanwhile, amid the Ukraine war, intensifying US competition with China and a busy domestic agenda, Israel-Palestine is far from the top of Biden’s priorities, a reality that Bisharat said cements Washington’s view of the current crisis as a minor, manageable matter.
Echoing Sheline, Bisharat said US officials waving prospects of the two-state solution only serves to maintain the status quo of indefinite Israeli occupation by treating it as temporary. (Int’l News Desk)
