Palestinians set to boycott US-led Mideast peace summit

Bloomberg

The Palestinian Authority said it will boycott a conference launching the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan because it’s focused on economic issues rather than the political disputes at the heart of the conflict with Israel.
The White House announced that it will hold a conference in Bahrain next month to promote economic development in the Palestinian territories as part of efforts to seek a Middle East peace agreement.
“We will inform Bahrain that we will not take part in such a conference,” said Nabil Shaath, an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “We will not sell our country based on an economic project.”
A Palestinian boycott of the peace plan at this early stage is both unsurprising and symptomatic of the deep problems the program will face. Having already resisted earlier efforts to launch peace talks with an initial focus on economic incentive, the Palestinians are even more suspicious that Trump’s initiative aims to end their aspiration to an independent state.
Since Trump took office, he’s walked back the longstanding US commitment to Palestinian statehood, recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, closed the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic mission in Washington and halted hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to the Palestinians.
The Palestinians cut off contacts with the Trump administration following the December 2017 Jerusalem move. In April, Shaath said they wouldn’t reject any US plan out of hand, but didn’t expect it would be acceptable to them.
The Palestinian Authority’s prime minister said his administration wasn’t consulted on the Bahrain conference.
The conflict “will only be resolved through a political solution,” and “any economic solution will be a result of a political solution,” PM Mohammad Shtayyeh said. “We will not be blackmailed through a financial war launched against us.”

Economic Strategizing
The June 25-26 “economic workshop” in Manama will “convene government, civil society, and business leaders to share ideas, discuss strategies, and galvanise support for potential economic investments and initiatives that could be made possible by a peace agreement,” the White House said in its statement announcing the meeting.
It will focus on an economic framework for the Palestinian people and the region, including the potential for private-sector growth, the administration said.
A political proposal being crafted by senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and US special representative Jason Greenblatt is expected to be unveiled at a later time, a senior administration official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The official declined to say what commitments any countries had made to the investment initiative, or who planned to attend. The event is expected to attract business leaders and officials from the US, Arab countries and Asia, the official said, declining to say who had been invited.
A spokesman for Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon said the minister hasn’t yet received a formal invitation to the summit.