US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser says Washington’s upcoming deal on the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict will fall somewhere between the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative on the issue and Tel Aviv’s position. RNA - In an exclusive interview with Qatar’s al-Jazeera broadcaster that would be broadcast on Tuesday, Jared Kushner stressed that the US’s proposal — which is called the “deal of the century” — would not adhere to the Arab initiative.
“I think we all have to recognize that if there ever is a deal, it’s not going to be along the lines of the Arab peace initiative,” he said. “It will be somewhere between the Arab peace initiative and between the Israeli position.”
The Arab initiative, which has been adopted by the Arab League, calls for the normalization of ties between the Tel Aviv regime and Arab states in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal from lands it occupied in the 1967 war, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem al-Quds and Syria’s Golan Heights.
In 2016, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu backed “the general idea” behind the initiative.
Kushner called the Arab initiative “a great effort,” adding, however, that “if that was where a deal was going to be made, a deal would have been made a long time ago.”
He made the remarks shortly before his departure for a US-sponsored workshop in Manama, Bahrain, where officials and businessmen from the US and some Arab states will discuss the economic section of Trump’s “peace” plan.
Referring to the two-day Manama conference that is due to begin on Tuesday, Kushner claimed that the event would be a success despite a Palestinian boycott.
“We’ve been working very carefully on a very detailed proposal for what we think can help bring this conflict, which has been stuck, forward and we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to put that out soon and hopefully parties will be responsible, they’ll engage on it and they’ll try to move forward,” he said.
All Palestinian factions have boycotted the Manama summit, accusing Washington of offering financial rewards for accepting the Israeli occupation.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said recently that a political solution must first be hammered out before an economic one.
“The Palestinians are seeking an entity, statehood, and after that we look at the economy,” he said.
On Saturday, the White House unveiled the details of the economic portion of Trump’s deal, which would inject $50 billion into struggling economies in the Middle East over the next ten years.
Under the document, dubbed “Peace to Prosperity,” over half of the funds ($28 billion) would go toward the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and the remaining to Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, which have absorbed Palestinian refugees.
It also includes a $5 billion “transportation network” to connect the West Bank and Gaza.
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