Abbas asks UN to lead peace push
UNITED NATIONS: With United States President Donald Trump’s Mideast peace envoys looking on, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas yesterday accused the Trump administration of abdicating its commitment to a peace settlement and an independent Palestinian state.
Abbas all but wrote off Washington as a potential peace broker during an angry address to the United Nations Security Council. He appealed instead to the
UN, and called for an international peace conference this year under
UN, not American, sponsorship.
‘‘We met with the president of the United States, Mr Donald Trump, four times in 2017, and we have expressed our absolute readiness to reach a historic agreement,’’ Abbas told the council during a tense session devoted to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. ‘‘Yet this administration has not clarified its position. Is it a two-state solution, or one state’’ of permanent Israeli occupation, he asked.
Trump’s envoys, son-in-law Jared Kushner and negotiator Jason Greenblatt, sat silently as Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, asserted that Abbas was shortchanging his own people with a default to grievances that ‘‘will get the Palestinian people exactly nowhere’’.
Haley addressed Abbas directly, although he had abruptly left the chamber following his speech. ‘‘Our negotiators are sitting right behind me, ready to talk,’’ she said. ‘‘But we will not chase after you.’’
Abbas urged an international framework for negotiations involving the Palestinian Authority, Israel and the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including the US.
‘‘No country alone can solve a regional or international conflict, without the participation of other international partners,’’ he said.
Senior Palestinian leaders have boycotted the Trump administration for more than two months, including what Trump has complained was a snub to US VicePresident Mike Pence during a Mideast visit in January.
Haley addressed the reason for this – Trump’s declaration last December that the US considers Jerusalem to be Israel’s capital – and told Abbas he could do nothing to reverse the US position.
Abbas should channel his anger into action towards a settlement and better life for his people, Haley said.
She did not pledge, as US diplomats and presidents had done for more than two decades before Trump, that the result of negotiations would be an independent Palestinian state.
Abbas said Trump’s embassy move was a ‘‘dangerous’’ prejudging of the status of Jerusalem, which is holy to three religions.
Security council diplomats from France, Sweden and other states made the same point more delicately. Diplomats also urged Trump to reinstate funding he cut for Palestinian refugees.