White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt arrived in Israel to discuss the Trump administration’s peace plan an hour before the government voted to dissolve and go to new elections.
Kushner and Greenblatt are scheduled to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday.
They were in Morocco on Tuesday, and Jordan on Wednesday, in an effort to convince the countries to participate in the Trump administration’s economic summit scheduled for next month in Bahrain. The meeting is being called an “economic workshop” to encourage capital investment in the West Bank, Gaza and countries in the region, and reportedly is the first step in the administration’s peace plan which is scheduled to be rolled out in the coming months.
The Palestinians have announced that they will not attend the meeting, and have called on Arab countries to boycott it. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have said they will send representatives to the conference scheduled for June 25-26 in Manama, the capital of Bahrain.
Following their meeting on Wednesday, Jordan’s King Abdullah in a statement “stressed the need to step up all efforts to achieve comprehensive and lasting peace on the basis of the two-state solution, guaranteeing the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on the 4 June 1967 lines, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living side by side with Israel in peace and security, in accordance with international law and relevant UN resolutions.”
An unnamed State Department official told Haaretz that the Bahrain conference will take place regardless of Israel’s decision to go to new elections.
