26 August, 2017
Saudi Arabia's crown prince met senior US officials including presidential adviser Jared Kushner in Jeddah on Tuesday and discussed efforts to bring about peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, Saudi state news agency SPA said.
US President Donald J. Trump (L) and his wife Melania (2nd L), and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) and his wife Sara (2nd R) stand after their meeting in Jerusalem, 22 May 2017.
Protesting Palestinians expressed their displeasure ahead of Kushner's meeting with P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. This is not to suggest that they should boycott Trump's envoys and not talk to them.
"The Americans have adopted the Israeli outlook that the conflict must be managed rather than acting to solve it". He said this week's visit "cemented Saudi and other Arab officials' respect" for Kushner and his team, who organized Trump's visit to the kingdom in May. He accompanied Trump to Jerusalem during the president's first foreign trip in May, and then returned briefly in June. "The Palestinian Authority and the USA delegation had a productive meeting focused on how to begin substantive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks". Kushner met with leaders from some of those countries this week.
USA officials said in response that they have not dismissed the two-state solution, but that any progress is dependent only on the two sides.
Tel Aviv regime officials also say they consider Jerusalem al-Quds as the "capital" of their own "state".
The kingdom is a key player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the palace said in a statement that Abdullah, Kushner and Greenblatt had stressed the need to start "serious and effective peace negotiations" on the "basis of the two-state solution".
Trump, Netanyahu and Abbas "are facing extraordinarily complicated circumstances", veteran Mideast peace envoy Aaron David Miller said, "and are fundamentally constrained" from making the concessions a peace accord would entail.
According to a report in Vanity Fair, Bannon pushed President Trump to adopt a tougher stance toward the Palestinians, while urging him to keep a campaign promise to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, only to face resistance from Kushner. "Peace can never take root in an environment where violence is tolerated, funded and even rewarded", Trump said.
The Kushner trip might actually be considered something of a success if the United States managed to identify an approach that Abbas and Netanyahu didn't blow out of the water immediately.
Generally, participants have sought to tamp down expectations.
"We highly appreciate President Trump's efforts to strike a historical peace deal, a statement he repeated more than one time during our meetings in Washington, Riyadh and Bethlehem", Abbas said at the beginning of the meeting.
For more than two decades, that proposal has served as the internationally accepted cornerstone for solving the conflict.
That ambiguity has angered the Palestinians. "This is the time and this is the opportunity".
"That said, it does seem that different parts of the administration are quite out of sync on foreign policy". To be sure, just before the Kushner team's arrival in the Middle East, Netanyahu government announced that it allocated $1.5m to build a fence around Beit El settlement. The 82-year-old Abbas is also fighting for his political survival as he reaches the end of his political tenure and is keen to carve out a legacy. The Palestinian Authority is broke. The Palestinian Authority already cut increasingly scarce finances to Gaza, deepening the rift between West Bank-ruling Fatah and rival Islamist hardliners Hamas, who have governed Gaza since 2007. But he's willing to take risks on the reform side, too, including challenging the kingdom's religious establishment. Both were later assassinated for their efforts. On former USA president Barack Obama, "he did his best but even with him the U.S. did not do what is necessary to put an end to the occupation and for the two-state solution", he said.
