FROM THE ENVIENT TO NEW YORK. Using reconstruction aid to bring the Palestinian Authority back to Gaza, weakening Hamas in the Strip and hindering its expansion into the West Bank. This is the most ambitious immediate goal of US Secretary of State Blinken, in the visit that from yesterday to Thursday will take him to Jerusalem, Ramallah, Cairo and Amman, according to what his collaborators said during a background briefing with reporters.
In Sunday interviews, the head of US diplomacy said that President Biden’s goal remains the two states, but this is not the time to try to restart the negotiations. So there will be no invitation to the parties to see each other in the US or elsewhere. The official aim is only to consolidate the truce, starting to create the conditions for dialogue.
Trump’s strategy was based on three points: to support Israel, to ignore the Palestinians, to agree with Arab countries interested in doing business with the Jewish state. So the plan of the son-in-law Kushner was to offer Abbas 50 billion dollars in exchange for the surrender, hoping that given the isolation he would accept it. It didn’t work and the violence blew up.
During the crisis, Biden chose behind-the-scenes diplomacy, because in 2014 Obama’s most assertive intervention made the situation worse. Now he does not want to repeat the mistake, also because his fundamental objective remains to reactivate the nuclear agreement with Iran, and therefore he does not send Blinken with the declared purpose of starting peace talks, but only to guarantee the continuity of the truce. However, it would be irrational not to take the opportunity to try to start a new drift, and here the aid money comes into play. Blinken collaborators say they want to “create a partnership between the UN and the Palestinian Authority to manage them. So we hope to reintegrate the PA in Gaza to some extent, hoping to create the conditions to move towards a more stable situation ». Washington is under no illusions, but so it hopes to weaken Hamas, which is the starting point for any negotiation.