Palestinian Solidarity at the World Cup and the Bankruptcy of U.S. Policy
in Democracy In Exile, Israel-Palestine, Palestine
The World Cup in Qatar and the annual conference in Washington of J Street, the liberal Zionist lobbying group, occurred half a world apart. Their global significance is hugely disparate. Yet, together, they highlighted both the extent to which the Biden administration is out of touch with popular sentiment internationally and the bankruptcy of its policy on Israel/Palestine.
Palestine has been ubiquitous at the World Cup. Despite the exceptional political repression Qatar imposed on the world's most widely watched sporting event, teams and fans repeatedly demonstrated their support for the Palestinian people—most of all in Morocco's remarkable run, with its players unfurling the flag of Palestine after each thrilling victory. Palestine has become a global symbol of resistance to unjust rule.
At the J Street conference on Dec. 3, the organization's executive director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, took some baby steps away from its previous dogmatic insistence that the two-state solution is the only acceptable resolution to the question of Palestine. In contrast, in his own speech to J Street the next day, Secretary of State Antony Blinken robotically repeated the Biden administration's commitment to an elusive two-state solution, while offering not a hint of how it might be achieved.