US Special Adviser Jared Kushner evades backing two-state solution but says Palestinians ‘deserve self-determination’.
White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner has said that the Palestinians deserve “self-determination,” but stopped short of backing Palestinian statehood, expressing uncertainty over their ability to govern themselves.
Kushner, who is President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, made the comments in a television interview with the Axios on HBO programmes, broadcast on Sunday.
Asked whether he believed the Palestinians were capable of governing themselves without Israeli interference, Kushner said: “That’s one that we’ll have to see. The hope is that they, over time, will become capable of governing”.
The Palestinians, he said, “need to have a fair judicial system … freedom of press, freedom of expression, tolerance for all religions” before the Palestinian areas can become “investable”.
One of the architects of the United States’s yet-to-be-released Middle East peace plan, Kushner said it would be a “high bar” when asked if the Palestinians could expect freedom from Israeli military and government interference.
The Palestinian leadership has boycotted the diplomatic effort that Trump has hailed as the “deal of the century”. Although Kushner has been drafting the plan for two years under a veil of secrecy, it is seen by Palestinian and some Arab officials as tilting heavily in Israel’s favour and denying
the Palestinians a state of their own.
In Sunday’s interview Kushner again avoided saying explicitly whether the plan would include a two-state solution, the bedrock of US policy for decades.
“I do think they should have self-determination. I’m going to leave the details until we come out with the actual plan,” Kushner said.
Last month, Kushner indicated that the US would be pulling back from its long-standing support of the two-state solution.
“If you say ‘two-state’, it means one thing to the Israelis, it means one thing to the Palestinians,” he told the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
“We said, you know, let’s just not say it. Let’s just say, let’s work on the details of what this means”.
Part of the plan is expected to be unveiled at a US-sponsored investment conference in Bahrain this month.
The Palestinian Authority has said it will not attend the event.
US officials have been vague about the timing for releasing proposals for resolving the political issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but experts are sceptical of the Trump administration’s chances for success.
The Palestinian leadership has refused to deal with the Trump administration since late 2017 when Trump decided to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognised Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
