US President Donald Trump’s extended invitation to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss bringing peace to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will not affect the Israeli right wing’s “long-term desire" of “pushing the Palestinian population out of the West Bank,” an American academic and anti-war activist has said.
Mr Trump and Mr Abbas also conducted a 20-minute long phone conversation on Friday which the White House described showed that “peace is possible” and “the time has come to make a deal.”
The conversation marked the first time the US President - who has declared himself a staunch supporter of Israel - has dealt directly with Palestinian officials, although CIA Director Mike Pompeo met with Palestinian Authority figures in Ramallah last month.
“The outline of what they intend to discuss [is] ways in which for Abbas can provide some sort of covering sanction for the plans of Trump to accommodate himself to the agenda [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu has with respect to Palestinians and the occupied territories,” Ralph Schoenma, author of the influential 1988 book ‘Hidden History of Zionism’, said on Monday.
Neither Mr Netanyahu's or Mr Abbas’ offices provided an immediate response to The Independent’s requests for comment.
The US president told reporters after a meeting with Mr Netanyahu last month that his administration was no longer wedded to the creation of a Palestinian state, signalling a departure from America's decades-old approach to Middle East foreign policy.
The US’ Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, later said the US remained committed to a two-state solution and anyone who believed Washington was abandoning the policy did so in “error”.
Many Palestinians are wary of Mr Trump’s intentions in the Middle East given his avowed support for Israel and the promise that the US Embassy to the country could be moved to Jerusalem, a city contested by both sides as their capital.
However, the President’s sincerity in wanting to secure peace in the region – demonstrated by the fact his son-in-law Jared Kushner has been put in charge of brokering a peace deal – has caught many in the region who assumed that Mr Trump's friendliness would leave the Netanyahu coalition government to its own devices off guard.
The international community generally supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in order to preserve the Palestinian identity and Israel’s unique status as a Jewish-majority state. However, increasing Israeli expansion in the West Bank – which shows no sign of slowing under President Trump – and the rise to power of Hamas in Gaza has led the two-state peace process to stumble in the last decade.
The Israeli political landscape has also swung to the right in recent years. Many prominent hardline politicians in Mr Netanyahu’s coalition government are against any form of Palestinian statehood.
