US readies ME peace plan in Bahrain
Finance officials were flying into Bahrain yesterday for a US-led peace conference that holds out billions of dollars for the Palestinians, whose leaders pronounced the idea dead on arrival.
Led by President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, the Peace to Prosperity economic workshop is billed as the opening of a long-delayed initiative that will later include political solutions to solve the long intractable Middle East conflict.
Unlike previous high-profile peace initiatives, the new plan will be an intimate affair opening this evening with cocktails and dinner at a luxury hotel in Bahrain, which like other Gulf Arab states has increasingly found common cause with Israel due to their shared hostility towards Iran.
It proposes raising more than $50 billion in fresh investment for the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours with major projects to boost infrastructure, education, tourism and cross-border trade.
Finance ministers from oil-rich Gulf Arab states along with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde are expected in Bahrain.
The Palestinian Authority is boycotting the workshop, with prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh criticising the plan for saying nothing about ending the Israeli occupation.
“This economic workshop in Bahrain is really going to be nonsense,” he told a cabinet meeting yesterday.
“What Israel and the United States are trying to do now is simply to normalise relations with the Arabs at the expense of the Palestinians,” he added.
President Mahmud Abbas has said the Palestinians “will not be slaves or servants” of Kushner or other Trump aides.
“For America to turn the whole cause from a political issue into an economic one, we cannot accept this,” he said.
The Trump administration says it is trying a new approach and will later release political proposals -- perhaps at late as November once Israel holds new elections and forms a government.
But Trump officials have hinted that their approach will not mention the creation of an independent Palestinian state, a goal of US diplomacy for decades.
Israel, which will attend the Bahrain conference, criticised the Palestinian leadership.
“I don’t understand how the Palestinians rejected the plan even before knowing what it contained,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday as he hosted Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton.
“That’s not how you move forward,” Netanyahu said.
Israel -- which has imposed a blockade for more than a decade of the impoverished Gaza Strip because the territory is ruled by Islamist militants Hamas -- says it welcomes the chance to improve the Palestinian economy.