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Bloomberg
President Donald Trump welcomed Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas to the White House on Wednesday as the U.S. president weighs how to approach a Middle East conflict that has eluded resolution for seven decades.
“It’s a great honor to have the president with us,†Trump said in an Oval Office photo session with reporters. “Hopefully something terrific can come out†of the visit, he added.
Abbas, 82, planned to urge Trump to take a personal stake in brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, according to his spokesman Nabil Abu Rudeineh. He is expected to be promoting longstanding positions that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejects, at a time when popular Palestinian support for negotiations with Israel has dwindled. Trump will encourage the Palestinians to see Israel in a changing regional context in which leaders of Arab nations have more common interests with Israel in terms of countering Iranian aggression and the brutality of terror groups such as IS.
“America will always stand with Israel even as we extend our hand and invite the Palestinian people and their leaders to embrace this opportunity and secure a more prosperous future,†Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster told a crowd at an Israel Independence Day gathering in Washington on the eve the Abbas visit. Success is possible only “if the American administration is ready and able to pressure the Israeli government†to end its occupation of Palestinian lands and halt construction of Jewish settlements, Abu Rudeineh said on Tuesday in a statement to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa.
Meanwhile, Abbas, who has become politically weakened at home, is under U.S. pressure to end a Palestinian policy of payments to prisoners who have committed terror acts and their families. Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, and other lawmakers are behind legislation to cut off U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority if the payment policy continues.
Trump has said he’d like to broker a peace agreement, calling it the “ultimate deal.†Since his inauguration, he has met with Arab leaders and Netanyahu, and has appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the former chief legal counsel for the Trump Organization, Jason Greenblatt, to pursue peace efforts.