U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is promoting the long-held dream of two states side by side — one Israeli, one Palestinian — as the best guarantor of peace.
promoted the long-held dream of two states side by side — one Israeli, one Palestinian — as the best guarantor of peace.
Blinken reiterated that it was President Biden’s “firm conviction that the only way to achieve that goal is through preserving and then realizing the vision of two states for two peoples.” And he cautioned the Netanyahu government: “The United States will continue to oppose anything that puts that goal further out of reach,” mentioning Israeli settlement expansion and moves “towards annexation in the West Bank.
“What we are seeing is the shrinking of the horizon of hope, and that needs to change,” he added, expressing his condolences for “the innocent Palestinian civilians who lost their lives in the last year.”In his diplomatic rounds, Blinken did not call for a new round of peace talks. He called for calm. The last attempt to promote the two-state solution was under President Barack Obama in 2014, led by former secretary of state John F. Kerry, and ended in failure.
Alice Krieger, a peace activist from Tel Aviv, said, “this conflict won’t end because things are going to get worse.”She observed that in his remarks on Monday, Blinken expressed his condolences for the seven people killed by a Palestinian gunman outside a synagogue in East Jerusalem on Friday but didn’t mention the military raid in Jenin in the West Bank that killed 10 Palestinians a day before.
Both Israelis and Palestinians pointed out that Netanyahu’s new government — an alliance of settler activists, religious conservatives and hard-line ultranationalists — rose to power promising to expand the occupation of the West Bank and implement harsher measures to counter Palestinian violence.Abdulazid said he thought the Americans would stand by as Israel built more Jewish settlements in the West Bank and seized more land.
“The position on the two-state solution is wrong. It’s anti-Israeli,” said Michael Yigal Mimon, 74, a historian from Nahariya in northern Israel.
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