Abbas says U.N. should replace U.S. as mediator
ISTANBUL—Breaking with years of courting the U.S., Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Wednesday for the United Nations to replace Washington as a Mideast mediator and suggested he might not cooperate with the Trump administration’s much-anticipated effort to hammer out an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal.
At a summit in Turkey, Arab and Muslim leaders “rejected and condemned” President Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital— the trigger for Abbas’ sharp policy pivot—but stopped short of backing his more combative approach toward Washington.
A possible Palestinian refusal to engage with the U.S. and growing backlash against Trump’s shift on Jerusalem, including from Arab allies, cast new doubt over the administration’s already seemingly remote chances of brokering a deal and succeeding where its predecessors have failed.
U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Wednesday the administration would continue to work on a Mideast plan that it believes will benefit Israelis and Palestinians. Referring to Abbas, she said that the “type of rhetoric that we heard has prevented peace in the past, and it’s not necessarily surprising that those types of things would be said.”
In shunning the U.S., Abbas would find himself in uncharted territory.
He does not have an immediate practical alternative to more than two decades of U.S.led negotiations on the terms of Palestinian statehood. The Palestinians seek such a state on lands captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war—the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem.
On the other hand, Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital was decried by Palestinians and others in the region as a provocative show of pro-Israel bias, making it difficult for Abbas to justify dealing with Washington as a mediator.
Trump’s argument that his announcement does not mean an endorsement of specific boundaries of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem has not gained traction in the ensuing uproar.
The fate of Jerusalem is a hot-button issue in the region, and even the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt—reportedly eager to help advance Trump’s Mideast efforts—cannot afford to be seen as soft on the religious claims of Muslims and political claims of Palestinians to the contested city. Israeliannexed east Jerusalem is home to Islam’s third-holiest shrine, along with the most revered site in Judaism and a major Christian church.
Wednesday’s extraordinary summit of the 57-member Organization of Islamic Cooperation ended with a call on Trump to rescind an “unlawful decision that might trigger chaos in the region” and on the world to recognize east Jerusalem as the capital of a state of Palestine.
A concluding statement lacked tougher criticism of U.S. policy contained in an earlier draft, which questioned Washington’s continued role as a Mideast mediator and warned that Trump’s shift on Jerusalem threatened global security.