You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

Trump Claims Mideast Peace “Not as Difficult as People Have Thought”

HeadlineMay 04, 2017

President Donald Trump welcomed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to the White House Wednesday, telling reporters that achieving peace in the Middle East is “maybe not as difficult as people have thought over the years.”

President Donald Trump: “The Palestinians and Israelis must work together to reach an agreement that allows both peoples to live, worship and thrive and prosper in peace. And I will do whatever is necessary to facilitate the agreement, to mediate, to arbitrate, anything they’d like to do. But I would love to be a mediator or an arbitrator or a facilitator. And we will get this done.”

President Trump’s comments came despite his remarks in February that ended a long-standing U.S. commitment to the establishment of a Palestinian state, saying he had no preference for either a one-state or two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Trump’s ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a longtime supporter of illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. And the Trump administration has proposed moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—a move fiercely opposed by Palestinians and much of the world community.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top