President Donald Trump is seeking “a conflict-ending settlement” for Israelis and Palestinians, his spokesman said ahead of Trump’s meeting with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
The statement Wednesday by Sean Spicer, who was confirming the May 3 visit, is an indication that Trump is determined to extract a deal from the two sides.
“They will use the visit to reaffirm the commitment of both the United States and the Palestinian leadership to pursuing and ultimately concluding a conflict-ending settlement between the Palestinians and Israel,” Spicer said in his opening remarks at the daily news briefing.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he wants a peace deal, but Cabinet officials to Netanyahu’s right favor unilateral actions, including annexing portions of the West Bank, that would stop well short of a final status deal.
Trump, who hosted Netanyahu in February at the White House, retreated from an explicit U.S. endorsement of the two-state solution — U.S. policy for 15 years — but also surprised Netanyahu by asking him publicly to slow settlement expansion for a period.
One of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers, Jason Greenblatt, has spent time in the region in an intensive canvassing of the principals ahead of reviving peace talks.
Marvelous. Trump still thinks the problem is that the Israelis and Palestinians don’t agree on some particular set of issues. What the Palestinians taught Jimmy Carter at Camp David in 1977 is that they do not want concessions from Israel. They want Israel not to exist. What the Palestinians taught Bill Clinton at Camp David in 1993 is that they do not want concessions from Israel. They want to destroy Israel. What the Palestinians taught Clinton again in 1994 at Oslo is that they do not want concessions from Israel. They want to destroy Israel. Donald Trump will soon learn that the problem between the Israelis and the Palestinians is not that no one has negotiated the right deal. There is no right deal when one of the parties negotiates in bad faith.