Blinken visits West Bank
Residents are disillusioned; leaders are angry
Maisoon Ali, a Palestinian banker, has a message for visiting U.S Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken.
She wants him to understand and acknowledge that the vision of an independent Palestinian nation living alongside Israel — the two-state solution favored by most U.S. administrations for years — is dead and buried.
“It has been killed,” said Ali, 56. “I can’t even dream it. I don’t see it. … This is what I want the secretary to hear.”
Blinken, wrapping up a three-day visit to the Middle East on Tuesday, met with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and other officials in the West Bank city of Ramallah, a day after extended consultations with Israel’s prime minister, president and foreign minister.
Abbas, 87, had tough words for Israel, its continued occupation of Palestinian territories and the failure of the “international community” to stop actions by Israel to seize Palestinian-claimed land and thwart efforts by
the Palestinian Authority to find justice in international forums — efforts that Washington firmly opposes.
At every turn in this visit, Blinken has reiterated his government’s long-standing support for the two-state solution, even as its prospects seem more distant than ever — to both Israelis and Palestinians.
The far right that now governs Israel has long opposed independence for the approximately 4.5 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
For the Palestinians themselves, rejection of the twostate solution has been a slower evolution.
In an independent Palestine next to Israel, which has insisted on keeping control of
some of the future state’s borders and airspace, “we would just have the name, Israel the power,” said 80-year-old Mohammed Mustafa, another resident of Deir Dibwan, who lived in the U.S. for many years and said he fought for the U.S. military in Vietnam.
Years of failed, occasionally bad-faith negotiations, interspersed with periods of violence from both sides, have only achieved a modicum of sovereignty for Palestinians while Israel continued to permit tens of thousands of Jewish settlers to move into West Bank lands claimed by the Palestinians. The heavily guarded Israeli settlements have effectively made creating a contiguous state next to impossible.