Abbas rejects US as a broker

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said on Friday that he would not accept any US plan for Mideast peace following President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

In a Christmas letter to Christians, Abbas called the White House “biased” in favor of Israel.

The US plan “is not going to be based on the two-state solution on the 1967 border, nor is it going to be based on international law or UN resolutions,” he wrote, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Abbas met with French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris Friday, a day after the UN General Assembly voted to condemn Trump’s decision.

A senior Palestinian official involved in the writing of Abbas’ letter told Haaretz that the Palestinians had not received information on any White House peace proposal.

Haaretz also reported that Abbas sent his close adviser Nabil Sha’ath to Russia for talks with senior Kremlin officials, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

Sha’ath will address the possibility of Moscow taking a more active role in the peace process, the newspaper reported.

Macron reaffirmed his disapproval of Trump’s Jerusalem decision.

“The American mistake was to want to unilaterally manage from afar a situation whose solution is in the hands of the Israelis and Palestinians,” he said.