Blinken peddles the same old lies

Bribing Palestinians into submitting to occupation is an overused failed ploy

First, we need to be clear and unambiguous: What brought US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to occupied Palestine was the Jerusalem attack carried out by the young Palestinian fighter Khairi al-Alqam, the Silwan attack by his 13-year-old comrade Muhammad Uleiwat, and the rise and steadfastness of localised resistance groups such as the Jenin, Lions’ Den, and Balata brigades. His objective is to save the Israeli occupier state from military, security, and economic collapse.

Blinken came to seek calm and a reduction in tension in exchange for a paltry $50 million donation to the UN refugee agency UNRWA. This was a bribe accompanied by crocodile tears. He expressed condolences to President Mahmoud Abbas forall the victims of Israeli occupation murdered over the past year, while equating the culprit and the victim on the same footing; he reiterated the tired, tedious, and tendentious claim that the USstill supports the two-state solution which died and decomposed long ago; and he declared its opposition to Israeli settlement-building that has already achieved its objective of devouring the bulk of Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.

It is scandalous for the ‘calm’ the US secretary of state seeks to be priced at a mere $50mn. Inreturn, the Palestinian security forces are supposed to return to their task of subjugating their people, providing their services to the Israeli occupation (notably by spyingon resistance fighters), and aborting another armed Palestinian uprising that could pose an existential threat to the occupier state. I’m proud to say that the only price acceptable to armed uprisings is total liberation of the land in its entirety.

President Abbas expressed his readiness to work with the US administration, restore security cooperation, and restart negotiations with the occupier state to reach the mirage and delusion called the two-state solution. Those negotiations went on for 30 years, and only served as cover for a colonialist onslaught that resulted in 800,000 Israeli settlers being implanted to date. This commitment to reverting to futile talks is shocking, and shatters whatever hopes remained.

The armed Second Intifida — launched after the Camp David talks in 2000 sponsored by the Clinton Administration in response to its demeaning provisions — was eventually quelled by means of false promises such as the ‘roadmap’ and the ‘Quartet”.Blinken is attempting to recycle similar lies to achieve the same results with his current tour. But he will not succeed. The armed groups and individuals that have proliferated in the West Bank don’t take orders from Palestinian Authority (PA) headquarters in Ramallah. They have no connection to Abbas’ PA, and, until now,treat its security forces as a subordinate branch of Israel’s.

Blinken’s mission will not, cannot, and must not succeed.The emergent armed intifada has changed the rules of engagement and resorted to the only language the occupation understands. Its young activists are committed to liberation, and do not and will never trust the US and the rest of the hypocritical West and their blatant lies.

The Second Intifada lasted four years. The third may persist for longer and erase all that preceded it, especially the disastrous Oslo Accords. It could initiate the rise of a new dawn in Palestine and the Arab World that frees them of the subjugation to the US and the Abraham, Camp David, and Wadi Arba agreements.

The future is ours to see.

Blinken peddles the same old lies