“’It remains the US view that the most expeditious path toward statehood for the Palestinian people is through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with the support of the United States and other partners,’ Vedant Patel, the State Department spokesman, told reporters earlier in the day.”

This writer is almost tired of pointing out the obvious: negotiations can only be effective when each party wants something the other has, that it can only obtain by surrendering something it has, that the other party wants. Israel takes what it wants from Palestine with complete impunity. And how can the establishment of an independent Palestine occur through negotiations when the current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said there will never be an independent Palestine? The U.S. had the opportunity to make it happen on April 18, but chose not to.

Richard Gowan, the United Nations’ International Crisis Group said the following, prior to the vote: “The U.S. position is that the Palestinian state should be based on bilateral agreements between the Israelis and Palestinians. It does not believe that the UN can create the state by fiat.” This raises two interesting points:

1) First, Israel isn’t going to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Netanyahu has made that clear.

2) If the U.S. does, in fact, not believe that the U.N. can create a state by fiat, how then does the U.S. explain the establishment of Israel? Did the U.N. not, in 1947 – 1948, created Israel by fiat?

The U.S. is the world’s best example of the double standard: it criticizes Russia’s crimes in Ukraine while supporting and even financing the same kinds of crimes, except on steroids, that Israel is committing in Gaza.

Government officials in the U.S. explain that President ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden is working to convince Netanyahu to allow more aid into Gaza, where children and adults are starving to death. All he need do to enable a flood of aid is tell Netanyahu that Israel will not receive another penny of U.S. ‘aid’ until the suffering of the Palestinians ends. But instead of that, he is sending hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weaponry to kill them. Why should Israel do anything different? It gets whatever it wants from the U.S. even as it spits in the U.S.’s collective eye.

Prior to the start of the Iraq War, massive protests were held around the world. Then President George Bush, in response to these protests said this: “Size of protest — it’s like deciding, well, I’m going to decide policy based upon a focus group.” Todd S. Purdum of The New York Times, commenting on this statement, said the following: “A focus group is a handful of people, carefully culled to reflect diverse viewpoints, chosen to help politicians or companies figure out how to sell a policy or a product.

Led by a facilitator, they are poked and prodded in a private room, asked about their likes and dislikes and encouraged to speak while strategists eavesdrop behind a one-way mirror.

“And while Mr. Bush may not like to acknowledge it, his administration does use focus groups, most recently to help determine how best to couch its public messages about domestic security.”

Perhaps Genocide Joe feels the same way; he can dismiss millions of people around the world, including massive numbers in the United States, who recognize ongoing genocide when they see it. He believes that such blatant violations of international law as invading and bombing hospitals and arresting and killing medical personnel and killing patients; bombing refugee camps; killing journalists; indiscriminately slaughtering men, women and children; dropping bombs on humanitarian aid workers and schools, mosques, churches and residential centers are not evidence of genocide. They are, he says, simply part of Israel ‘defending’ itself from the existential threat of a ragtag band of dedicated people who are resisting a brutal, decades long occupation.

And what of the existential threat to Palestine? For decades, Israel has been stealing more and more Palestinian land, establishing settlements that are illegal under international law, and arbitrarily killing, arresting and torturing Palestinian men, women and children. Why does Palestine not, in the eyes of the United States government, have a right to defend itself?

Genocide Joe is an elderly Zionist, believing the myths about Jews who oppose apartheid as being ‘self-hating Jews’, and not willing to recognize that it was the United Nations, and not God, who criminally displaced 750,000 Palestinians to establish the Zionist regime.

The United Nations created the problems that have plagued the Middle East for 76 years; the United States is not, never has been and can never be an honest player in resolving them. The United Nations must work to end the very un-democratic veto power in the Security Council, give more authority to the General Assembly which, unlike the 15 member-nation Security Council has representatives from 193 nations, and bring freedom to the Palestinians. The current genocide, which will be a stain on the records of many nations for generations to come, must end. The U.S. must not be allowed to enable it to continue.

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