Trump
blasted Abbas in Bethlehem on 23 May:
"You tricked me in D.C.! You talked there about your commitment to peace, but the Israelis showed me your involvement in incitement"
- Tillerson too was made to look stupid after he had told a Senate hearing on 13 June that he had been informed that Abbas intended ceasing the policy of payments to terrorists.
Tillerson's claim was immediately
repudiated by Issa Qaraqe, the head of the PA prisoners affairs department:
"This is not true and this statement is an aggression against the Palestinian people,"
Such duplicity does not augur well for creating an environment hoping to end the Jewish-Arab conflict.
Straight talking from Trump is needed to:
- Bury the negotiating process between Abbas and Netanyahu that torpedoed the attempts by President Obama and Secretaries of State Clinton and Kerry to end the conflict between 2009 and 2016.
- Terminate the artificially contrived framework misnamed "the two-state solution" within which previous negotiations have been conducted between Abbas and Netanyahu with total disregard for the origins of the conflict between Jews and Arabs.