Trump’s Mideast plan unlikely to achieve peace: Arab League

Bloomberg

The Arab League should adopt a united stance towards US President Donald Trump’s Mideast plan, which is unlikely to achieve peace and stability for Palestine and Israel, its Secretary General Ahmed Aboul Gheit said.
“Today’s meeting is a message that the Palestinians are not alone,” Gheit said on Saturday at the start of an emergency meeting of Arab foreign ministers to review the proposed road map. The current situation is setting the stage “for another hundred years of conflict in the region,” he said.
Speaking at the meeting in Cairo, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas urged the UNSC to reject the blueprint, which he said would take away 30% of the West Bank.
The plan that gives Israel tacit approval to annex settlements in the West Bank and control over Jerusalem as an undivided capital was drawn up without Palestinian involvement. Palestinians claim all of the West Bank for a future state and reject Trump’s offer as being worse than what they’ve received in previous failed negotiations.
Critics say the offer for
a fragmented nation-like Palestinian state years in the future is a non-starter aimed chiefly at domestic political audiences in the US and
Israel, where Trump and
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are both locked in legal wrangling ahead of elections.