Trump Envoy's Exit Highlights Waning Optimism for Mideast Plan
Trump’s Middle East Peace Envoy Jason Greenblatt Stepping Down
(Bloomberg) -- For two and half years, Jason Greenblatt shuttled around the Middle East as he sought to promote Donald Trump’s vision of peace -- the vaunted “deal of the century” -- to Arab and Israeli leaders.
On Thursday, with the plan still a mystery, he resigned.
Greenblatt’s departure is the latest hurdle to what may have been an impossible job to begin with. Israeli-Palestinian peace has eluded generations of U.S. presidents, and Middle East experts grew more skeptical of the Trump team’s chances after the Palestinians cut off communications with the White House, furious over the administration’s pro-Israel moves.
“If Greenblatt had any expectation that the plan would go somewhere, he would not be resigning,” said Martin Indyk, who was a U.S. special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during the Obama administration. “They have a basic design problem: They have no way of getting the Palestinians to accept the plan and haven’t been talking to them since 2017.”
Greenblatt said he was leaving to spend more time with his family, and the White House said the plan will still be released when the timing is right. The president praised Greenblatt in a tweet Thursday, thanking him for “his dedication to Israel and to seeking peace between Israel and the Palestinians.”
Avi Berkowitz, a little-known adviser to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and State Department official Brian Hook will take an expanded role on the team.
But Greenblatt’s exit is another sign of waning enthusiasm for a plan that was once seen as a top Trump administration priority. A day before his inauguration in January 2017, Trump announced that Kushner would lead the team formulating a peace plan, saying “if you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can.”
Kushner and Greenblatt began making extensive trips to the region while constantly signaling that a plan was coming soon. But few details ever emerged. When Trump, in moves seen as bolstering Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, announced he would move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, the Palestinians cut off talks with the administration.
They never returned.
Trump only deepened Palestinian anger by suggesting he was ambivalent about a “two-state solution” to the conflict. He cut off funding to a United Nations agency helping Palestinian refugees and later recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. While he said the Israelis would have to make sacrifices when the U.S. plan was released, it’s never been clear what those sacrifices would be or whether the Israelis would accept them.
The hurdles to any peace plan are legion, requiring a resolution of how much of the occupied West Bank -- portions of which are densely populated with Jewish settlers -- would remain under Israeli control, whether Palestinian refugees across the region would have the right to return to their ancestral lands and whether East Jerusalem could serve as a Palestinian capital.
Administration officials repeatedly emphasized that decades of peace efforts had failed and that they were trying a fresh approach, but the president’s secret plan appeared to have few backers outside of Kushner and Greenblatt.
With Netanyahu facing a second election this month and the threat of bribery charges hanging over him, he’s unlikely to back any proposal demanding Israeli concessions. And Arab leaders, notably Jordan’s King Abdullah II, have been quietly signaling discomfort with the plan, worried that it could be perceived as too pro-Israel and stoke regional unrest.
The Palestinians, meanwhile, remain politically divided and hobbled, with the militant group Hamas governing in Gaza while the aged and weakened Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas oversees the West Bank.
Unwilling to lay bare the political side of their plan, Kushner and Greenblatt decided to begin promoting the economic component instead. A “Peace to Prosperity” economic blueprint, which aimed to generate more than $50 billion in new investment over 10 years, was released in a two-day workshop in Bahrain earlier this year. But there weren’t any concrete commitments, and neither Palestinian nor Israeli representatives took part in the conference.
Indyk speculated that the plan’s ambitions may be scaled back and used to help Trump drum up support among U.S. voters “by doing away with the two-state solution and the Palestinian right of return, something evangelicals and some Jewish voters could embrace.”
But with little to show publicly after more than two years, Greenblatt is departing. Before Trump’s 2016 election win, Greenblatt had worked as the Trump Organization’s top real estate lawyer. Officials said Thursday that he originally intended to join the administration for two years to draft the plan, and is now returning to New Jersey to be with his wife and six children.
Greenblatt and other administration officials struck an optimistic note on the path forward.
“It has been the honor of a lifetime to have worked in the White House for over two and a half years under the leadership of President Trump,” Greenblatt said in a statement Thursday. “I am incredibly grateful to have been part of a team that drafted a vision for peace. This vision has the potential to vastly improve the lives of millions of Israelis, Palestinians and others in the region.”
--With assistance from Nick Wadhams and Glen Carey.
To contact the reporter on this story: David Wainer in New York at dwainer3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bill Faries at wfaries@bloomberg.net, Larry Liebert
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