Biden continues to stay disturbingly close to Trump.
By Michael Brown | The Electronic Intifada | Apr 2, 2021
Recognizing the reality of occupation, moreover, means recognizing that Israel has no sovereignty over these territories and that the Palestinians living in them enjoy essential international protections, including the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Last year, presidential candidate Joe Biden personally intervened to keep the word “occupation” out of the Democratic Party’s platform regarding Israel.
In doing so, he infuriated a portion of the party’s base – a group Biden and his advisers presumably figured would dislike President Donald Trump and his anti-Palestinian policies even more than they might have disliked Biden.
Now the Biden administration is trying to thread the needle on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and Syria’s Golan Heights with the State Department’s latest annual human rights report.
It is titled: “2020 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Israel, West Bank and Gaza.”
The Biden State Department therefore stuck with similar wording to the reports issued by the Trump administration covering 2017, 2018 and 2019, which also omit any mention of occupation from their titles.
