United Nations – US President Donald Trump’s Middle East peace team briefed members of the UN Security Council on their plan to jumpstart negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on Tuesday.
Two sources familiar with the briefing told The Jerusalem Post that Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law leading the diplomatic effort, Jason Greenblatt, his special representative for international negotiations, and Nikki Haley, US envoy to the UN, fielded questions from diplomats for roughly an hour after a public session of the council concluded.
The briefing by senior Trump administration officials followed a speech to the council by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who asked UN members to come up with an international mechanism that would replace any US-led effort.
Kushner, Greenblatt and Haley — who sat in attendance for Abbas’s speech — dismissed that proposal in the briefing, the sources said, noting that it would take perhaps a year to organize yet another conference on Middle East peace bound to fail. Instead they plan on rolling out their peace plan in short time, they added, while declining to specify their timeframe.
According to the diplomatic sources, Kushner and Greenblatt said of the plan that “both sides are going to love some of it, and hate some of it.” The US team underscored their belief that Israeli settlement activity is unhelpful for the peace process, but told council members that past demands for freezes had proven counterproductive, suggesting that no such demand is forthcoming in the plan.
Kushner and Greenblatt have been working on a plan to get both sides to the negotiating table for over a year. But Trump’s decision in December to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and to move the US embassy there, infuriated the Palestinians and led them to write off the administration as fair arbiters.
The peace team was pressed on allegations of its bias toward Israel in the briefing, to which its members responded that, if they were truly biased, they would have spent less time coming up with such a detailed plan.
They also requested council members encourage the Palestinians to give their peace plan a fair shake upon its release. They have made a similar ask of the Arab League, which also opposed Trump’s Jerusalem decision, but has in recent years sought to warm relations with Israel and resolve its conflict with the Palestinians once and for all.
As reported by Vos Iz Neias