The United States will not release the long-delayed political
portion of its Israeli-Palestinian peace plan before Israel’s elections next
month, White House Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt said.
The move, announced in a tweet by Greenblatt, keeps the plan’s
details from becoming an issue in the election, in which the leadership of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close ally of U.S. President Donald Trump,
is at stake.
“We have decided that we will
not be releasing the peace vision (or parts of it) prior to the Israeli
election,” Greenblatt said on Twitter.
Trump’s son-in-law Jared
Kushner has been working behind the scenes on the plan to resolve the
decades-old Israeli Palestinian conflict, although Palestinians, who say the
Trump administration is too pro-Israel, say it is dead in the water.
A goal to raise tens of
billions of dollars to fund the plan was announced earlier this year, but the
political details have remained under wraps, with Kushner refusing to say even
whether it would offer Palestinians a state of their own.
Trump on Monday had said the
plan might be revealed before the Israeli election.
At a campaign rally on
Wednesday, Netanyahu said he expected the U.S. proposal would not be delayed
for much longer.
“This evening we learned that
President Trump’s ‘deal of century’ would be published and presented to the
world after the election. I can reasonably estimate that it will happen very
soon after the election,” Netanyahu said.
Peace talks between Israel
and the Palestinians collapsed in 2014. The Palestinians seek to establish a
state in the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as its capital, areas
Israel captured in a 1967 war. Israel moved troops and settlers out of Gaza in
2005 and still occupies the West Bank.