Trump plays up Middle East peace hopes after talks
BETHLEHEM: United States President Donald Trump talked up the prospects of peace between Israelis and Palestinians yesterday, saying he believed both sides were committed to an historic deal, but he offered no concrete proposals on how to get there.
After an hour of talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, in the Israelioccupied West Bank, Trump said he was committed to trying to achieve a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
‘‘I intend to do everything I can to help them achieve that goal,’’ he said.
‘‘President Abbas assures me he is ready to work towards that goal in good faith, and Prime Minister (Benjamin) Netanyahu has promised the same. I look forward to working with these leaders towards a lasting peace.’’
While Trump has spoken frequently in the months since he took office about his desire to achieve what he has dubbed the ‘‘ultimate deal’’, he has not fleshed out any strategy his Administration might have towards achieving it.
He has appointed his soninlaw, Jared Kushner, as a senior adviser on brokering an agreement, while Jason Greenblatt, formerly a lawyer in Trump’s real estate group, has taken the daytoday role of liaising with officials and leaders in the region on the nittygritty of any solution.
While both Netanyahu and Abbas have made positive noises about their readiness to negotiate, both also face domestic constraints on their freedom to manoeuvre and strike a deal.
Netanyahu must deal with opposition from rightist elements within his coalition who oppose any steps towards a twostate solution to the decadeslong conflict. Abbas’s Fatah party is at sharp odds with the Islamist group Hamas, which is in power in Gaza, leaving no unified Palestinian position on peace.
Standing alongside Trump, Abbas (82), in the 12th year of his original fiveyear term, said he was determined to deliver an agreement for all Palestinians, although he did not provide any substance on how such an objective could be achieved.
Ahead of his visit to the Middle East, the second leg of a nineday tour that began in Saudi Arabia and will move on to the Vatican, Italy and Belgium, administration officials indicated that Trump might talk about ‘‘Palestinian selfdetermination’’, a nod towards the ultimate objective of statehood.
But in his public remarks, Trump did not mention what has been the goal of US diplomacy for two decades: a state of Israel and an independent Palestinian state coexisting sidebyside.
During meetings with Netanyahu on Monday, Trump focused attention on the threat from Iran but also talked about the opportunities for peace in the region and how Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations were shifting their stance, potentially opening a window towards a regional agreement.
One of the longstanding regional proposals is a Saudi peace initiative that was first put forward in 2002 and has been reendorsed several times since.
In effect, it would offer Israel recognition by the Arab world and the ‘‘normalisation’’ of relations in exchange for a full withdrawal from the territory Israel has occupied since the June 1967 Middle East war, including East Jerusalem. It also urges a ‘‘just settlement’’ of the Palestinian refugee problem.