Trump Won’t Release Peace Plan Before Israeli Elections

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu during the president’s visit to Israel in May 2017. Image by Getty

By Marcy Oster August 28, 2019

JERUSALEM (JTA) — It’ll be at least more three weeks before we see any of the Trump administration’s Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.

“We have decided that we will not be releasing the peace vision (or parts of it) prior to the Israeli election,” White House special Mideast envoy Jason Greenblatt wrote in a tweet Wednesday.

Days earlier, President Donald Trump had told reporters on the sidelines of the G7 conference in France that while the whole plan would not be released before the Sept. 17 vote, they “may see what the deal looks like before the election.”

The plan, which has been shepherded by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, originally had been scheduled for release after a new Israeli government was in place following elections in April. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the winner of the spring vote, was unable to form a coalition and new elections were called unexpectedly.

The economic component of the plan was rolled out in June at an economic peace summit in Bahrain boycotted by the Palestinians. No Israeli officials were invited to the meeting.

The “Peace to Prosperity” plan calls for $50 billion in investments to transform the Palestinian economy and build democratic infrastructures, including making the Palestinian judiciary more independent and expanding Palestinian higher education.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO