Anthony Blinken, the outgoing U.S. Secretary of State, revealed in an interview published on Saturday that he was set to travel to Saudi Arabia to hash out "the Palestinian component" of a normalization agreement between Riyadh and Jerusalem before the horrible Hamas massacre that disrupted all Middle Eastern diplomacy.
Sec. Blinken and Opposition Chairman Yair Lapid
(צילום: שחר עזרן)
“On October 6 we were very much pursuing normalization between Saudi Arabia and Israel," the top diplomat of the Biden administration told the New York Times. "And in fact, I was scheduled to go to Saudi Arabia and Israel on October 10. Obviously, that didn’t happen.”
"The purpose of that trip was to work on the Palestinian component of any normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel, because we believed and the Saudis also said it was hugely important to make sure that if there was going to be normalization, there was also a pathway toward a Palestinian state.”
Further in the interview, Blinken dismisses claims that Israel is perpetrating a "genocide" in Gaza, while criticizing the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for, on some occasions, not “doing enough” to facilitate the flow of aid into the war-ravaged Palestinian enclave.
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Blinken added he was dismayed by the hypocrisy of the international community as demands for ceasefire increasingly bracketed out the horrific attack that sparked the war.
“One of the things that I found a little astounding throughout is that for all of the understandable criticism of the way Israel has conducted itself in Gaza, you hear virtually nothing from anyone since October 7 about Hamas.”