Kushner blasts Palestinians for ‘blowing every opportunity’

“The Palestinian Authority would rather go and complain as opposed to come to the table and negotiate,” said Kushner.

By World Israel News Staff

In response to the Palestinian Authority’s outright rejection of President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Israelis and Palestinians, Jared Kushner, a top adviser to the president, his son-in-law, and considered a leading force in formulating the plan, is firing back.

“They have a perfect track record of blowing every opportunity they’ve had in their past,” Kushner said Tuesday on CNN of the Palestinian leadership.

He called on the PA leadership to “read the details” of the Trump plan,”stop posturing, and do what’s best to try to make the Palestinian people’s lives better.”

The president’s senior aide maintained in the interview that if the PA cooperates, they would be on “a pathway to a state, a contiguous territory, and [have the] conditions where they can earn their way to their independence, their dignity, all these different things along with a $50 billion economic plan that could make them a very, very thriving state in the future.”

The 10-year economic plan was announced in June 2019, calling for Palestinian projects worth $27.5 billion in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, and $9.1 billion, $7.4 billion, and $6.3 billion for Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, respectively. Projects envisioned include those in the health care, education, power, water, high-tech, tourism, and agriculture sectors.

Kushner was the main initiator of the Peace to Prosperity summit, which took place at the end of June following the announcement of the economic plan. The summit was held in Bahrain, one of the countries backing the U.S. initiative.

However, the PA leadership boycotted the event. Kushner accused them at the time of making a strategic mistake.

PA leader Mahmoud Abbas had charged that the Bahrain conference was “a big lie that Kushner and others invented to make fools of the people” and which “started with a speech by Kushner and ended with a speech by Kushner.”

Following the announcement on Tuesday of the Trump peace plan, Kushner said, in an interview with Al Jazeera, that “the Palestinian Authority would rather go and complain as opposed to come to the table and negotiate which quite frankly shows that they are not ready to have a state.”