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.