To the Biden administration, Israel is always at fault—even while 11 Israelis are murdered
Secretary of State Antony Blinken‘s visit to Israel last week coincided with a wave of terrorist attacks. In the week preceding Blinken’s visit, an Israeli Bedouin man affiliated with ISIS killed four and severely wounded two by driving his car into a crowd and stabbing people with a knife. Later that week, a Palestinian man from east Jerusalem stabbed a civilian in Israel’s capital and another Palestinian stabbed and wounded two Israeli police officers. Then, on the first day of Blinken’s visit, two terrorists who also had ISIS affiliations shot at multiple crowded restaurants, killing two Border Police officers and wounding five others. And two days later, a Palestinian man shot at pedestrians, killing five. They included a young father pushing a toddler in a stroller and two Ukrainian citizens.
Yet, when Blinken met with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, his description of the situation made it sound like it was Israel that needed to be reined in. In a statement after the meeting, Blinken said he and Bennett “discussed ways to foster a peaceful Passover, Ramadan, and Easter across Israel, and Gaza and the West Bank,” which he said meant “working to prevent actions on all sides that could raise tensions, including settlement expansion, settler violence, incitement to violence, demolitions, payments to individuals convicted of terrorism, evictions of families from homes they’ve lived in for decades.”
Note that amidst a wave of terror by Palestinians against Israelis, Blinken’s list of the actions to foster peace includes four which fall to Israel and just one that is clearly the responsibility of the Palestinians, with a sixth item—”incitement to violence”—vague enough to belong to either or both.
Someone seeking to interpret Blinken’s remarks charitably might have presumed that he sought to bring up Israel’s faults in Jerusalem and would later stress the Palestinians’ problems in Ramallah, to encourage each side to change. But such a person would have been proven wrong when Blinken presented the exact same litany, almost verbatim, hours later that day after a meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The problem with Blinken’s list is not just its insensitivity to a nation in mourning, but what it reveals about the Biden administration’s orientation to this conflict. The Biden administration “obsessively” fixates on settler violence, a senior Israeli source told me. And this obsession creates a false equivalence and lets the Palestinians off the hook.
