The Palestinians on Monday vowed to reject a US-led peace initiative to be presented in Bahrain that dangles the prospect of $50 billion as an Israeli envoy bluntly told them they should "surrender". Finance chiefs from the United States, oil-rich Arab states and international development institutions were flying to the tiny kingdom, which in a rarity is openly welcoming Israelis, who have forged an indirect alliance with Gulf rulers due to mutual hostility with Iran.
Led by President Donald Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, the Peace to Prosperity economic workshop that begins Tuesday evening is billed as the start of a new approach that will later include political solutions to the long intractable Middle East conflict. It proposes raising more than $50 billion in fresh investment for the Palestinians and their Arab neighbours with major projects to boost infrastructure, education, tourism and cross-border trade.
The Palestinian Authority is boycotting the workshop, denouncing the plan for saying nothing about ending the Israeli occupation. "This economic workshop in Bahrain is really going to be nonsense," Palestinian prime minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told a cabinet meeting. "What Israel and the United States are trying to do now is simply to normalise relations with the Arabs at the expense of the Palestinians," he added.
President Mahmud Abbas has said the Palestinians "will not be slaves or servants" of Kushner or other Trump aides. "For America to turn the whole cause from a political issue into an economic one, we cannot accept this," he said.
Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, criticised the Palestinian leadership for declaring that the plan amounted to surrender. "I ask: What's wrong with Palestinian surrender?" he wrote in an opinion piece in The New York Times. "Surrender is the recognition that in a contest, staying the course will prove costlier than submission," he said.
Denouncing both the "corrupt" Palestinian Authority and Hamas militants who control the Gaza Strip, Danon noted that Palestinian unemployment remained stubbornly high despite years of international assistance. "Given this woeful state of affairs, it is self-evident that the Palestinian people need a new course of action," Danon wrote, charging that Palestinian national identity was "motivated not by building a better life for its people but by destroying Israel".
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