I don’t know about this one!
Donald Trump is perhaps the greatest living dealmaker on the face of the Earth today. And he’s reportedly trying to apply those talents to the Middle East conflict, attempting to broker an Israel/Palestine peace treaty.
I love President Trump, but I don’t have a good feeling about this! The Palestinians (which is really a misnomer because there never has been a recognized body called Palestine) have rejected all peace deals and seek only to steal, kill and destroy. How do you make peace with that?
Here’s the report, from the Washington Examiner:
President Trump thinks the Palestinians are ready to negotiate a peace deal with the Israelis, Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said.
“The president told me he thinks Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas wants to get a deal with Israel and that he [Trump] thinks that the time is ripe for a deal and that it is possible,” Dershowitz told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, comments he confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
Dershowitz, a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly passed that message to Netanyahu after talking to Trump at the president’s resort at Mar-a-Lago. The exchange suggests that Trump wants to restart a process that has stymied U.S. presidents, most recently the Obama administration, which increasingly blamed Netanyahu’s administration for the failure of the talks and allowed the United Nations Security Council to censure Israel in December.
“He knows very well the possible elements of the deal,” Dershowitz added.
The deal has proven elusive, despite then-Secretary of State John Kerry’s high-profile attempt to broker an agreement in Obama’s second term. He faulted Israel for allowing the construction of settlements which presented an “obstacle to peace” in December, weeks ahead of an anti-Israel resolution passing the UN Security Council.
“The Israeli prime minister publicly supports a two-state solution, but his current coalition is the most right-wing in Israeli history, with an agenda driven by the most extreme elements,” Kerry said in a speech explaining the Obama team’s refusal to veto the resolution.“The result is that policies of this government, which the prime minister himself just described as more committed to settlements than any in Israel’s history, are leading in the opposite direction. They’re leading towards one state.”
Trump’s team made a series of symbolic moves to signal that “the days of Israel-bashing are over,” as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told AIPAC, but the resumption of peace talks will test their negotiating skills. There is a bipartisan skepticism of the Palestinian leadership, due to their support for terrorism, even among critics of Israel’s settlement policies.
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