Trump Dangles Middle East Peace Plan to Limit Jerusalem Outcry

Trump’s phone call to Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday, the day before he made his bombshell announcement on Jerusalem, appeared to shed new light on behind-the-scenes efforts by White House advisers to craft a peace blueprint expected to be rolled out in the first half of 2018 but which has now been thrown into doubt because of an angry outcry across the Middle East.

With Palestinians declaring it will be difficult for the United States to act as an honest broker after essentially siding with Israel on one of the central disputes in the conflict, administration officials said they expected a “cooling-off period.”

Read: Tunisians Protest Against Trumps Jerusalem Decision

Trump’s team, led by his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, will press on with the development of a plan to serve as the foundation for renewed Israeli–Palestinian negotiations, hoping the furor will blow over and that any pause in diplomatic contacts with the Palestinians will not last long, U.S. officials said.

But amid protests in the Palestinian territories and uncertainty about whether the Palestinians will stay engaged in the peace effort, one U.S. official said the process could still be disrupted.

“If they are still saying they’re not going to talk, we’re not going to do it then,” the official said.

Washington's major Western and Arab allies have warned that Trump's decision on Jerusalem could doom attempts to achieve what the U.S. president has called the “ultimate deal” of Israeli-Palestinian peace.

Details of the negotiating framework have yet to be finalized and there is little indication of tangible progress.

Read: Trump Recognises Jerusalem as Israel's Capital

But officials said it would deal with all the major issues, including Jerusalem, borders, security, the future of Jewish settlements on occupied land and the fate of Palestinian refugees, and would also call for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states to provide significant financial support to the Palestinians.

In his call to Abbas on Tuesday, Trump sought to temper the blow from his Jerusalem announcement by stressing that the Palestinians stood to gain from the peace plan that Kushner and U.S. Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt were crafting, according to two U.S. and two Palestinian officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.

REUTERS