On the fourth day of the new conflict between the Israeli army and the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Thursday, May 13, Joe Biden devoted his main intervention to an exclusively American subject: the lifting of the recommendation to wear a mask for people vaccinated against Covid-19. “An important step”, “a great day”, welcomed the President of the United States, obviously unwilling to get involved in this new Israeli-Palestinian crisis.
A letter to the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, the contents of which have not been made public, possibly written before the outbreak of the crisis; a telephone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: White House speech has so far been limited, although National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Secretary of State Tony Blinken have multiplied contacts with their Israeli counterparts and that the head of the Pentagon’s political department met with his Thursday in Washington.
The same day, responding to a question from the press, Joe Biden camped on an American line traditionally favorable to the Hebrew state. “One of the things I have seen so far is that there has been no overreaction”from Israel, he said. ” The question is how to get to a point where there is a significant reduction in attacks, especially rocket attacks which are fired indiscriminately into population centers. “, He added, speaking of the Palestinian shootings.
Limited objective of a return to calm
In the record of the telephone conversation with the Israeli prime minister on May 12, Joe Biden made only a very discreet allusion to the tensions in Jerusalem which precipitated the crisis. He was content to share “His conviction that Jerusalem, a city of such importance to believers all over the world, must be a place of peace”.
This measured word and the limited objective of a return to calm reflect the conviction that the situation is not conducive to a new diplomatic engagement by Washington. When he was Barack Obama’s vice-president from 2009 to 2017, Joe Biden was able to measure the vanity of American ambitions in terms of relaunching a peace process in an outdated coma. He had witnessed the failure suffered during the first term, after the speech in Cairo delivered in June 2009 by the president, then that of the initiative launched by Secretary of State John Kerry, in July 2013, which was concluded without any progress nine months later.
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