The recent U.S.-Israeli proposal for a regional peace initiative, floated by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during their meeting in Washington earlier this month, is a non-starter, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Monday.
Speaking at the opening session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, Abbas stated that it is impractical “to discuss temporary solutions or merge the question of Palestine within the framework of regional affairs as the current Israeli government has attempted to do. Peace in the world can be secured by the realization of the two-state solution, Palestine and Israel, living side by side on the pre-1967 borders in peace and security.”
Abbas made his remarks just two weeks after the American and Israeli leaders stated that there may be a way to achieve peace in the Middle East beyond the two-state solution, suggesting a “regional approach.”
While Abbas proclaimed his government’s “readiness and willingness to cooperate with all countries, including the U.S. administration of President Trump, toward the achievement of peace on the basis of international law and international resolutions,” he also demanded that “countries that have recognized Israel and believe in the two-state solution [should] defend and support this solution by recognizing the State of Palestine.”
Most Western countries believe that recognizing a Palestinian state should come after an Israeli-Palestinian agreement is fully reached, not before. The Palestine Liberation Organization, which Abbas chairs, made similar promises in 1993 when then-PLO chairman Yasser Arafat committed the Palestinians “to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between the two sides and declare[d] that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations.”
Since becoming Palestinian Authority president upon Arafat’s death, Abbas has sought to evade direct negotiations with Israel, and rejected a peace offer from then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Instead, he has focused on convincing international bodies to impose terms on Israel.
Abbas admitted that this was his strategy in a 2011 New York Times op-ed, in which he wrote, “Palestine’s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one.” Abbas added, “It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.”
“It is no surprise that this Council, which has long been divorced from reality, has chosen once again to provide a platform for Palestinian smears against us,” Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon said in response to Abbas’s speech at the UNHRC. “It is time that Abbas and the Palestinian leadership understand that a new era has dawned at the UN in which speeches and one-sided initiatives against Israel will not succeed. The only way forward is through direct negotiations with Israel.”
The Trump administration has reportedly been considering pulling out of the council, in no small part due to its continued criticism of Israel. Anne Bayefsky, the president of the nonprofit Human Rights Voices, praised this proposal in an article in National Review on Sunday. Bayefsky called the council “the most anti-Israel, twisted bastion of moral relativism in the U.N. system…One agenda item is devoted to human-rights violations by Israel, and one generic agenda item is for all other 192 U.N. member states that might be found to ‘require the Council’s attention.’
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