White House senior adviser Jared Kushner has stressed that President Donald Trump is a "maker of peace deals", calling on Palestinians to make use of that and to refrain from "hesitation" in kicking off the negotiations.
During a press conference Wednesday at the White House in preparation for the ceremony establishing diplomatic relations between UAE and Israel, Kushner said that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi and deputy supreme commander of the UAE Armed Forces, have made a wide stride towards peace and this brings high hopes to the Middle East.
He added that the deal gives Palestinians "the opportunity" to make peace.
Responding to a question regarding annexing parts of the West Bank, he replied “The reason why they never accomplished anything was because both parties were getting what they wanted. Every time a negotiation failed, Israel took more land and the Palestinians got more money from the international community.”
Kushner said that the Trump administration’s peace plan is an attempt to “save the two-state solution” because it stops Israel from further expanding its presence in the West Bank.
“And so, right now, you have a situation where there is land that could become a Palestinian state. It is possible to connect it, but the land that Israeli settlers are in right now is land that Israel controls, and the odds of them ever giving it up is unlikely,” Kushner said.
“That’s why the map that we drew was what we thought was a realistic map… we played the ball as it lies, right? We took the realities in the world today and we drew a map based on that, knowing what was achievable and what was not achievable.
"My fear for the Palestinians is that if they do what they’re very good at doing, which is figure out how to not make a deal and play the victim card, then what’s going to happen is, you know, more time is going to go by and the situation is just going to get worse and worse for them,” he added.
“In the first meetings with PA President Abbas, he said, ‘If you could get Israel to agree to a map, then the rest will be easy to figure out.’ We did better than that: We got them [the Israelis] to agree to a state with a map,” Kushner said.
He also told the Palestinians that it was up to them to come to the table to negotiate and that the US would not “chase” them, warning that if they continue to reject the plan, their situation would likely only get worse.
