Shortly after Israel intensified its air strikes on Rafah, a city in southern Gaza into which more than 1 million Palestinians have been pushed by Israel’s military campaign, the United States announced that Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia this week to start his seventh mediation tour since the outbreak of the Gaza conflict on Oct 7.
“The Secretary will discuss ongoing efforts to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza that secures the release of hostages and how it is Hamas that is standing between the Palestinian people and a cease-fire,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on Saturday.
That statement on Blinken’s latest “pro-peace” shuttle diplomacy suggests that the United States is hell-bent on continuing to pour oil on the flames of the conflict while posing as an earnest peace-broker.
That Israel’s air strikes on Rafah came as US President Joe Biden signed into law legislation that includes $26 billion in assistance for Israel, the majority of which is earmarked for military spending, simply makes a mockery of the top US diplomat’s mediation efforts, a key objective of which, according to Miller, is to “prevent the conflict from spreading”.
After the US became the only party to veto a United Nations Security Council draft resolution to grant UN membership to the State of Palestine earlier this month, which is a necessary step to realize the two-state solution that the US allegedly supports, the US side still feels no qualms about claiming that it wants “lasting peace and security in the region, through a pathway to an independent Palestinian state with security guarantees for Israel”.
With large-scale student protests against the Biden administration’s lopsided pro-Israel policy engulfing the US, Blinken should be in a better position than before to realize that the root cause of the crisis is not that Israel’s security has not been guaranteed, but Israel’s greed that has not been satisfied yet.
The US has been covertly encouraging Israel to continuously encroach on Palestinian territories on the other side of the 1967 borders over the past decades, during which the US’ closest ally in the Middle East has never stopped trying to grab parts of its neighbors’ territories as its own land.
Blinken is therefore obliged to explain to his Middle East hosts whether the US can only accept a Palestinian state that is under its own control or governed by a proxy government of Washington since what the US vetoed in the aforementioned UNSC draft resolution is exactly what in the eyes of the majority of the international community is an independent Palestinian state.
The world can clearly see Washington and Tel Aviv are on the same page regarding the future of the Palestinian state and that it is not Hamas but the US that “is standing between the Palestinian people and a cease-fire”.
Shame on the US for sending its top diplomat to the Middle East to talk about a cease-fire while it continues to supply Israel with weapons.
