Palestinians to Boycott Meeting Kicking Off U.S. Peace Plan

(Bloomberg) -- The Palestinian Authority said it will boycott a conference launching the Trump administration’s Middle East peace plan because it’s focused on economic issues rather than the political disputes at the heart of the conflict with Israel.

The White House announced late Sunday that it will hold a conference in Bahrain next month to promote economic development in the Palestinian territories as part of efforts toward a Middle East peace agreement.

“We will inform Bahrain that we will not take part in such a conference,” said Nabil Shaath, an adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. “We will not sell our country based on an economic project.”

A Palestinian boycott of the peace plan at this early stage is both unsurprising and symptomatic of the obstacles the program will face. Having resisted earlier efforts to launch peace talks with an initial focus on economic incentive, the Palestinians worry that Trump’s initiative aims to end their aspiration for an independent state.

Not Speaking

Since Trump took office, he has walked back the longstanding U.S. commitment to Palestinian statehood, recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, closed the Palestine Liberation Organization’s diplomatic mission in Washington and halted hundreds of millions of dollars of funding to the Palestinians.

“What makes it very difficult to see the conference being successful is that the U.S. has canceled all donor assistance to the Palestinians, so it’s asking others to invest where it has chosen to divest,” said former U.S. ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro.

The Palestinians cut off contacts with the Trump administration following the December 2017 Jerusalem move. In April, Shaath said they wouldn’t reject any U.S. plan out of hand, but didn’t expect it would be acceptable to them.

Earlier Monday, the Palestinian Authority’s prime minister said his administration wasn’t consulted on the Bahrain conference.

The conflict “will only be resolved through a political solution,” and “any economic solution will be a result of a political solution,” Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told the weekly cabinet meeting. “We will not be blackmailed through a financial war launched against us.”

Economic Strategizing

The June 25-26 “economic workshop” in Manama will “convene government, civil society, and business leaders to share ideas, discuss strategies, and galvanize support for potential economic investments and initiatives that could be made possible by a peace agreement,” the White House said in its statement announcing the meeting.

It will focus on an economic framework for the Palestinian people and the region, including the potential for private-sector growth, the administration said.

The conference will never succeed unless potential investors, foreign governments and private companies will “know what the political process looks like and what the goal is, to understand the background of their investment,” said Shapiro, who is a senior visiting fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies. If Trump’s political proposal for resolving the conflict isn’t also released before the meeting, then the conference “is unlikely to have meaningful results.”

The political plan, being crafted by senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and U.S. special representative Jason Greenblatt, is expected to be unveiled at a later time, a senior administration official told reporters Sunday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The official declined to say what commitments any countries had made to the investment initiative, or who planned to attend. The event is expected to attract business leaders and officials from the U.S., Arab countries and Asia, the official said, declining to say who had been invited.

A spokesman for Israeli Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon said the minister hasn’t yet received a formal invitation to the summit. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office declined to comment.

--With assistance from Gwen Ackerman.

To contact the reporter on this story: Fadwa Hodali in Ramallah at fhodali@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lin Noueihed at lnoueihed@bloomberg.net, Amy Teibel, Michael S. Arnold

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