Senior adviser to the US president Jared Kushner has vowed to discuss his peace plan with the region’s leaders before unveiling it after the month of Ramadan.
“What we will be able to put together is a solution that we believe is a good starting point for the political issues and then an outline for what can be done to help these people start living a better life,” Kushner said.
During a meeting at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Thursday, Kushner stated that US President Donald Trump assigned him to find a solution.
“I was given the assignment of trying to find a solution between the two sides and I think what we’ll put forward is a framework that I think is realistic... it’s executable and it’s something that I do think will lead to both sides being much better off,” Kushner said.
“We’re building a very good business plan with a strong economic component for how Palestinians can move forward economically,” he added.
The Middle East proposal, which has been delayed for several reasons over the past 18 months, has two major components. It has a political piece that addresses core issues such as the status of Jerusalem, and an economic part that aims to help the Palestinians strengthen their economy.
Kushner – who is working on his plan with Jason Greenblatt, the top White House Middle East peace negotiator, - stressed that the proposal is not an effort to impose the US will on the region, criticizing the Palestinian leadership for failing to exert sufficient efforts throughout the past decades to ensure the interests of Palestinians.
For his part, Secretary-General of the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) executive committee Saeb Erekat said after meeting a US delegation in Ramallah on Friday that “the US-proposed ‘Deal of the Century’ is more about dictates and not a peace agreement that may be reached through negotiations.”
“A deal may mean that a party agrees to sell its property as a result of bankruptcy, that is, it entails a winning party and a loser one, a term used in the real estate industry and television entertainment games,” he added.
“On the other hand, a peace treaty means an agreement between two or more parties, resulting in a win-win equation for all parties,” Erekat emphasized.
He reiterated the constant position of the Palestinian leadership that any solution ruling out international resolutions and the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital will be rejected.
He added that all decisions of the US administration regarding Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, settlements, borders, and the annexation of the occupied Palestinian territories and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights are “null and void, and flagrant violations of international law.”
