DAVOS, Switzerland - US President Donald Trump has questioned whether peace talks with Israel will ever resume, blaming the Palestinians.
Trump said Palestinians had “disrespected” the US in the wake of his controversial decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Trump accused Palestinians of disrespecting the United States and threatened to withhold aid worth hundreds of millions of dollars until they accede to US-brokered talks.
In a significant sharpening of his rhetoric against the leadership in Ramallah, Trump said the Palestinians had “disrespected us a week ago by not allowing our great vice president to see them.”
“We give them hundreds of millions,” Trump said during a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Davos, Switzerland. “That money is not going to them unless they sit down and negotiate peace.”
The Trump administration is pressing sceptical Palestinians to enter a US-sponsored peace process that has so far appeared to offer much to their arch-foes Israel.
Palestinians were especially enraged by Trump’s recent decision to recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital - which for decades both sides agreed would be the subject of negotiation. Trump insisted that he could still be an honest broker.
“We have a proposal for peace. It is a great proposal for the Palestinians,” Trump claimed, adding that Israel would also be forced to make concessions.
But the US president also doubled down, saying he would move the American embassy to Jerusalem as soon as next year, despite no suitably sized building existing. “We anticipate having a small version of it open sometime next year,” Trump said.
Netanyahu warmly welcomed Trump’s “historic decision”, saying it “recognises history, recognizes a certain reality, built on the basis of truth.”
Netanyahu later said he was willing to enter talks, despite earlier dismissing the idea of the creation of a Palestinian state.
While Trump was speaking in Davos, his ambassador at the UN Nikki Haley was also turning up the heat on the 82-year-old Palestinian leader, Abbas.
Haley accused the veteran president of lacking the courage needed for a peace deal. “To get historic results, we need courageous leaders,” she said.
The United States remains “deeply committed” to an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, Haley said, “but we will not chase after a Palestinian leadership that lacks what is needed to achieve peace.”
Earlier this month Abbas accused Trump of trying to make the Palestinians a scapegoat, by painting them as rejecting talks that did not exist. “Shame on you,” he said.
Trump said he had not seen those remarks. “I think I’m probably better off not seeing them,” Trump said.
“You know what, it’s many years of killing people. It’s many years of killing each other. They have to be tired and disgusted of it,” he added.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians rejected US President Donald Trump’s fresh threat to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in aid on Thursday, with a senior official labelling him an “oppressor”.
A spokesman for president Mahmud Abbas said they would not meet with the US administration until it withdrew its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
“If the American administration will not go back on their decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, it will remain outside the (negotiation) table,” Nabil Abu Rudeina said. Another senior Palestinian official, Hanan Ashrawi, told AFP “not meeting your oppressor is not a sign of disrespect; it is a sign of self-respect.” US President Donald Trump’s controversial recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital led to a spike in Palestinian support for “armed struggle”, a poll suggested Thursday.
Nearly twice as many Palestinians said they supported “armed struggle” against Israel compared with an identical survey six months previously, while there was also a fall in support for the two-state solution, the joint Israeli and Palestinian poll found.
The poll of 1,270 Palestinians across east Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza was conducted in the days after Trump’s December 6 declaration that he would move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognise the city as Israel’s capital.
Palestinians see at least the east of the city as the capital of their future state, and the announcement set off street protests and diplomatic fury.
Given four options for their preference for the next step for Palestinian-Israeli relations, 38.4 percent of Palestinians favoured waging an armed struggle, the most popular single answer and compared with only 26.2 percent who called for reaching a peace agreement.
The same poll in June found 21 percent support for armed struggle, while 45 percent backed a peace agreement.
Khalil Shikaki, from the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and one of the report’s authors, said there had also been significant declines in Palestinian support for a peace process and compromise as well as in the popularity of Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
“There is absolutely no doubt that the Trump statement was the fundamental cause.”
Dahlia Scheindlin from the Tami Steinmetz Center at Tel Aviv University, another report author, said that she expected the support for militancy could fall in the coming months if tension subsides.