WASHINGTON, USA: U.S. President Joe Biden is following the same “crude and hostile” foreign policy of his predecessor Donald Trump in dealing with Middle East issues, a Palestinian writer wrote on Thursday.
“The truth is that Biden’s foreign policy so far didn’t show any difference from Trump’s crude and hostile policy, especially in the Middle East,” Rajab Abu Sariya, a Palestinian political analyst and columnist, wrote in an opinion piece published in the Al-Ayyam newspaper.
Biden has neither cancelled the sanctions imposed by Trump on Iran, nor delivered the promise to reopen the U.S. consulate in the occupied East Jerusalem, while failing to open any clear horizon for a political process between the Palestinians and Israelis, Abu Sariya said.
“So far, Biden is still content with words only, without translating them into actions,” he opined.
The U.S. is similar to Israel where the change of government always fails to bring about a change in the foreign policy, he said.
The article was in response to the recent announcement by the White House about the planned Biden’s visits to Israel and Palestine in July, the first since he took office.
To prepare for Biden’s visit, senior U.S. diplomats arrived in the West Bank earlier this week and held talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Prime Minister Mohammed Ishtaye, and other officials in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
During the meetings, the Palestinian officials urged the U.S. government to remove the PLO from the U.S. list of terrorism, reopen the closed office of the PLO in Washington, and reopen the U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem that was closed during Trump’s era.
But Biden’s visit to Israel aims primarily at trying to persuade Israel to move beyond its neutral stance toward the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Abu Sariya noted.
Therefore, Biden will try to calm the inflamed Palestinian front by preventing the Palestinian leadership from escalating its position against Israel, Abu Sariya said.
He concluded that as Biden adopts the slogan of “money for peace,” all that the U.S. president can offer to the Palestinian side is to help the Palestinian Authority to pay the salary bills.
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