TRUMP ON MIDEAST: ‘WE WILL GET THIS DONE’

Vows to be a ‘facilitator’ for peace

WASHINGTON • President Donald Trump expressed confidence he can help the Israelis and the Palestinians negotiate a peace agreement, declaring, “We will get this done.”

But speaking during a meeting at the White House on Wednesday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Trump also warned that “there can be no lasting peace unless the Palestinian leaders speak in a unified voice” and renounce violence and hate — a reference to the split between the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, and the militant Hamas group, which controls the Gaza Strip.

Trump also cast the United States in a more intermediary role.

“I’m committed to working with Israel and the Palestinians to reach an agreement, but any agreement cannot be imposed by the United States or any other nation,” he said.

“The Palestinians and Israelis must work together to reach an agreement that allows both peoples to live, worship and thrive and prosper in peace.”

Trump said he would be a “mediator, an arbitrator or a facilitator” for peace.

“We'll start a process which hopefully will lead to peace,” he said.

“Over the course of my lifetime, I've always heard that perhaps the toughest deal to make is the deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Let's see if we can prove them wrong, OK?”

He added, “There's such hatred, but hopefully there won't be such hatred for very long,”

Abbas, for his part, nodded to the president's background as a businessman, saying he respected Trump's “great negotiating ability,” and called for a two-state solution.

“Our strategic option, our strategic choice, is to bring about peace based on the vision of the two-state, a Palestinian state, with its capital in East Jerusalem, that lives in peace and stability with the state of Israel, based on the borders of 1967,” Abbas said.

Trump, who in February met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, has called a possible Palestinian-Israeli accord “the toughest deal in the world” but one he is determined to try to broker. Some analysts are skeptical, however, that Trump will succeed in an arena where his predecessors have fallen short.

“Every president, when they come into office, thinks they can bring about an Israel-Palestinian deal,” said James Gelvin, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of California at Los Angeles.

“Everyone fails, and then they turn their attention to issues that are more pressing. This is probably going to be the same sort of thing.”

“Abbas has hitched his horse for a long time to the Americans and a negotiated settlement, and so he really wants to deliver,” Gelvin added.

“The problem is: He doesn't really have a partner in order to be able to deliver. The Israelis are not anxious to deliver.”

Dennis Ross, counsellor at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and former American envoy to the Middle East, said that although immediate results are unlikely, the meetings could set the table for later progress.

“You can't solve the conflict right now. The gaps between the Israelis and Palestinians are too wide. We are at the lowest ebb in IsraeliPalestinian perceptions of each other since I've been working on this,” Ross said.

“But you can create a sense of possibility, you can break the stalemate, you can show that something is possible.

“And that's what I think can happen here — you can show that a sense of possibility exists.”

ABBAS HAS HITCHED HIS HORSE TO THE AMERICANS.