White House senior adviser Jared Kushner said on Wednesday that he is “very confident” the recent Middle East peace agreements brokered by President Trump between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Israel and Bahrain will make an ultimate resolution with Palestine “more likely.”
“The moves yesterday were the first peace breakthroughs in the Middle East in 26 years,” Kushner told “Outnumbered Overtime.” “I am very confident that that will make it more likely that there will be a resolution with the Palestinians in a fair way at a time people are ready to make peace.”
Kushner outlined how historical negotiations in the Middle East have failed because “the incentives have been all wrong” but noted that President Trump has taken a different approach to achieve these recent breakthroughs.
“President Trump’s strategy has been to not do stupid things, not keep old habits that don’t work, and, what he has done is he is actually the first president to outline a realistic vision for what a peace agreement could look like between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” Kushner said, citing details from the president’s 180-page proposal on the issue.
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Although Kushner expressed optimism on the matter, according to an Israeli news outlet, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh slammed Trump’s peace deals in a statement on Monday.
“These agreements mark a dark day in the history of the Arab nation and a defeat for the Arab League,” Shtayyeh said.
Palestinian leadership views the recent normalized ties between the Arab nations and Israel as a “stab in the back,” and a threat to the Saudi Arabian-led Arab Peace Initiative – which seeks the full withdrawal of Israel from the occupied lands in exchange for diplomatic ties.
“The Arab League has become a symbol of Arab weakness,” Shtayyeh said, rejecting Tuesday’s ceremony.
“These peace deals will kill the Arab peace initiative,” he added.
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In Kushner’s view, conflict in the Middle East has “gone unsolved for so long” because two issues are being conflated.
“You have the Israeli-Arab conflict, which is about the mosque and old issues. And that is what these peace agreements did, it really is the beginning of the end of the Israeli-Arab conflict,” Kushner said.
“And then you have the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which at its core is really a territorial dispute between two people that is based on fighting three wars over the last 70 years … we need to just resolve that territorial dispute, and I think that is how that will openly get resolved.”
Fox News’ Caitlin McFall contributed to this report.
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