Biden Signs the Palestinians’ Death Certificate
By Gideon Levy
July 21, 2022:
Information Clearing
House
-- "Haaretz" At Augusta Victoria
Hospital in East Jerusalem, of all
places, U.S. President Joe Biden signed
a death certificate. The two-state
solution died a long time ago, and now
so has the Palestinians’ strategic
choice of relying on the West in their
struggle for their national rights.
This hope drew its last
breath at Augusta Victoria. In his
speech Biden mused at great length about
his and his family’s time in the
hospital; he remembered the intensive
care ward. A flat line on the monitor
meant death, he learned there. About an
hour later, in Bethlehem, the monitor
flatlined. The path the Palestinians
embarked on 50 years ago has come to an
end. They have reached a dead end.
At the beginning of the
‘70s, a new star appeared in the
political skies: the cardiologist Issam
Sartawi, a refugee from Acre, a student
in Iraq, an exile in Paris and an
architect of the plane hijackings. He
underwent a complete change. He became
the Palestinians’ trailblazer to the
West’s heart; until then they had relied
on nonaligned countries. Sartawi led the
Palestinians to Bonn, Vienna, Paris and
Stockholm instead of Moscow, Jakarta,
Delhi and Kuala Lumpur.
This was depicted as an
excellent choice. The protégé and even
the darling of Western Europe’s social
democratic stars of those days – Willy
Brandt, Bruno Kreisky, Olof Palme and
François Mitterrand – continued on to
the Israelis’ hearts. Sartawi began with
meetings with representatives of the
Israeli left. Yasser Arafat
enthusiastically joined the path his
adviser had blazed. It seemed much more
promising than winning support from
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It’s a president who
doesn’t bother to correctly
pronounce the name of
Shireen Abu Akleh, the
journalist killed almost certainly
by Israel, becoming a national and
international symbol. Jamal
Khashoggi he knows how to pronounce.
The Palestinians no longer have
anything to look for in this arena.
When Biden quoted from a poem that
says how “hope and history rhyme”
and threw them $100 million for
Augusta Victoria, it was clear that
it’s lost with the United States.
With an American
president who promises them a
two-state solution, but “not in
the near term,” you get to the end
of the story. You feel like asking
Biden: “What will happen ‘not in the
long term’ that will achieve this
solution? Will the Israelis decide
on their own? Will the settlers
return on their own? When there are
a million of them instead of
700,000, will that satisfy them?
Will America ever
think differently? Why should this
happen? With the laws against BDS
and the new and distorted
definitions of antisemitism, the
United States and Europe are lost as
far as the Palestinians are
concerned. The battle has been
decided, Israel has all but beaten
them, and their fate might be the
same as that of the indigenous
peoples in the United States.
It’s enough to look
at the picture of the meeting in
Bethlehem: Twelve grim Palestinian
men in ties around the two leaders
in a group photo of despair. It’s
enough to recall Biden’s words in
1986 to the secretary of state at
the time, George Shultz: “I hate to
hear an administration … refusing to
act on a morally important point. …
I’m ashamed that this country puts
out a policy like this, that says
nothing, nothing.”
Biden was referring
to U.S. policy on the previous
apartheid country, South Africa.
Amazingly similar remarks can be
hurled now at Biden because of his
approach to the second apartheid
country. But there’s no Biden to
hurl them.
Fifty years later this
road has reached its end, with the
Palestinians bleeding on the ground. An
American president only gives them a few
hours – on a visit that gives new
meaning to the terms doing the minimum
and lip service. So the time has come to
awaken from the dream that Europe and
America will ever do something for the
Palestinians that won’t be to the
satisfaction of their unassailable
cherished one, Israel.
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