Peace seems far away

Palestinians condemn ‘unfair’ US diplomacy over Israeli issue

After hearing Joe Biden identify occupied Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and concede a two-state solution seemed “far away”, one Palestinian official gave a blunt assessment of the US president’s visit to the region.

“It’s like the Trump years with a smile,” said the official, who requested anonymity.

Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump was loathed among Palestinians over his unequivocal pro-Israeli policies.

With Israeli politics gridlocked, few thought that 79-year-old Biden could jumpstart peace talks which have been moribund since 2014. But there was tempered optimism that Biden’s meeting with Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in the occupied West Bank town of Bethlehem could deliver modest results.

Dozens of Palestinians demonstrated in the West Bank city of Bethlehem against US President Joe Biden’s visit over the long-time unfair US diplomacy in dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli issue.

“We all know that Biden came here to politically, economically, and militarily support Israel, not to help the Palestinian people,” Antoine Issa, a 39-year-old man told Xinhua, adding “for decades, US diplomacy has turned its back on the Palestinians, whereas Israel has received much of American support.”

“I have heard repeatedly from US presidents, from Bill Clinton to Biden, that they support a two-state solution that would end the conflict, but the reality is completely different,” he said.

Biden said at a joint news conference following a meeting with his Palestinian counterpart Mahmoud Abbas that “the US commitment to the goal of a two-state solution has not changed,” but added that “the goal of the two-state solution may seem unattainable.”

In a bid to express their dissatisfaction against the unfair US diplomacy toward Palestinians, Issa was among dozens of protesters who raised black banners and waved Palestinian flags against Biden’s visit.

Not far from Issa, the 45-year-old Samah Ahmed told Xinhua that “Biden does not believe in peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis.”

She said Biden was pushing for Israel’s normalisation of relations with more countries in the Middle East and protecting it by various means.

Both Issa and Samah believe that the Palestinian people have not and will not make progress on the Palestinian issue as long as the US administration is the only mediator on the Palestinian-Israeli issue.

In the city of Ramallah, Mohammed Aram, a local citizen, told Xinhua that he does not care about the results of Biden’s visit, saying “I know in advance that we will not gain anything from the US diplomacy.”

The 55-year-old man believes that the importance of the Palestinian issue has declined at the international level as some Arab countries have normalized ties with Israel under US mediation.

What made the matter worse, he explains, is the internal Palestinian division between Fatah and Hamas, which forcibly controlled the Gaza Strip in 2007 after rounds of fighting with forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority.

In addition, Israel imposed a tight siege on Gaza and launched four large-scale military campaigns against the Gazans, leaving thousands of casualties and extensive destruction of civilian buildings and infrastructure.

Ibrahim Sarsour, a Gaza-based resident, told Xinhua that “Israel attacked us with the advanced American-made weapons,” saying “the United States is the head of the snake.”

The Palestinians want to establish an independent state alongside Israel on all the territories occupied by Israel in 1967, including the entire West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

However, the last direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians, sponsored by the United States, broke down in 2014 over their deep differences on the issues of borders, security, and settlement.

Biden’s Zionist declaration

According to AFP, the president’s visit got off to a bad start for Palestinians, when Biden declared at an Israeli welcome ceremony: “You need not be a Jew to be a Zionist.”

While every US president since Israel’s creation in 1948 has arguably met a technical definition of Zionism by actively supporting the Jewish state’s existence, Biden’s comment was rare, if not unprecedented for a US leader — and Palestinians took note.

“He came to Israel and declared he was a ‘Zionist’, then he came to Palestine and refused to talk about the fundamentals of the conflict,” the official said.

A protester attending a rally during the president’s visit to Bethlehem hoisted a sign saying: “Biden, Jerusalem is Palestine — no matter your Zionism.”

Palestinians claim the Israeli-annexed eastern part of the city as their capital.

Biden has for decades publicly supported recognising west Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and has said he will not reverse Trump’s controversial decision to move the US embassy there back to Tel Aviv.

On the peace process, Biden reaffirmed his support for Palestinian statehood while urging perseverance even as conditions appear bleak.

“I know that the goal of the two states seems so far away,” he said in Bethlehem.

“But we never give up on the work of peace,” he added. “There must be a political horizon that the Palestinian people can actually see or at least feel. We cannot allow the hopelessness to steal away the future.”

Palestinian prime minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said a difficult terrain for peace talks does not excuse American inaction.

“If, as the US president said, the (two-state) solution is currently out of reach, then there must immediately be a (Jewish) settlement freeze, in accordance with international law and resolutions to preserve the right of the Palestinian people to their independent state,” Shtayyeh said.

For Tahani Mustafa, West Bank analyst at the International Crisis Group think-tank, Biden’s visit left “no indication that the situation of the Palestinian people has any place in his administration’s agenda”.