The U.S. secretary of state says the
Trump administration has been consulting allies
across the Middle East about its plan.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
says that immediately
following Israel’s April 9 parliamentary election,
the Trump administration will build on the
foundations already laid towards reaching an
Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
“We’ve been working on this for a long
time…We’ve begun to share elements of this across
the region. It won’t be a U.S.-driven process,”
Pompeo said, as he addressed the World Economic
Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday, speaking by
satellite in a video conference.
“Ultimately, the Israelis and the
Palestinians will have to come to an agreement.
But we think that the foundations that we have
laid and the work that we’ll do immediately
following the Israeli elections will set
conditions where we can have a constructive
conversation,” Pompeo added.
In the past, U.S. officials have
hinted about the future of the plan but refused to
commit to a specific timetable of when details
would be announced. Since late December, when the
Knesset legislated the early election, the
prevailing view has been that the process would
have to wait until after the April ballot.
Even once the election takes place,
the process of forming the new Israeli government
coalition could take another several weeks,
raising the question of whether the U.S. would
wait until the new Cabinet is in place.
Last week, President Donald Trump’s
Special Representative for International
Negotiations Jason Greenblatt dismissed an Israeli
television report on the U.S. president’s peace
plan as not accurate and not helpful.
The Channel 13 report said the
proposal included a divided Jerusalem and would
offer a Palestinian state in up to 90 percent of
Judea and Samaria, with major settlement blocs
to be annexed by Israel. There would also be
land swaps according to which the Palestinian
state would receive land from within Israel in
exchange for territory that Israel would annex
in Judea and Samaria.
Greenblatt tweeted that he would
“highly recommend” that people listen only to
the official statements that come from him,
President Donald Trump, the president’s
son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, or U.S.
Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. He did not
include Pompeo on the list.
Speaking Tuesday, the U.S.
secretary of state said that “it seems to me
that we’re at a point in time where there are
ways that we can resolve the primary differences
and encourage… the Israelis and the Palestinians
to come together to resolve their differences
and get a solution there that has bedeviled the
world for an awfully long time.”
Pompeo did not attend the Davos
conference in person because of the cancelation
of the trip due to the U.S. government shutdown.