Trump only wanted to proceed with Abbas’s approval even though Kushner explained that the logic of the deal was “heads you win, tails they lose.”
Former US president Donald Trump nearly shelved his peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians at the last minute because the latter did not support it, contrary to what was presented as the plan’s unique logic, former White House senior advisor Jared Kushner wrote in a book set to be published later this month.
In January 2020, Kushner thought the time was right to release the president’s peace plan. He and then-ambassador to Israel David Friedman walked Trump through the parts of the plan and their expected reactions to it for over an hour. Kushner pointed out that the plan has the support of then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and now-Defense Minister Benny Gantz, his rival, though they were running in a contentious election.
Trump asked if the Israelis and the Palestinians agreed to the plan, and Kushner said no.
“I have a lot of issues going on right now,” Trump said, according to Kushner. “And this is not my top priority. I don’t want to do anything if Abbas says no. Set up a call with him. I’ll be able to tell by his tone if there’s a chance. Otherwise, let’s wait to release the plan at a later date and not waste our time.”
“I don’t want to do anything if Abbas says no.”
Former US president Donald Trump
What did Trump want?
Trump only wanted to proceed with Abbas’s approval even though Kushner explained that the logic of the deal was “heads you win, tails they lose,” as he called it, in that, if the Palestinians agreed, that would be “a huge win,” but in the much more likely scenario that they did not, “the Arab world will see that the Palestinians are unwilling to even come to the table to consider a plan with real compromises, including a path to a Palestinian state, and they will likely be more open to normalizing relations with Israel.”
By allowing the Palestinians to veto the plan entirely, Trump went against the idea that the Palestinians’ rejection would reveal their intransigence, to Israel’s advantage.
In an “unexpected but fortunate development,” Abbas refused to take a call from Trump, saying he would only speak to the president after the peace plan was released.
After that, Kushner, who was in Davos for the World Economic Forum, cut his trip short early.
“I wanted to be near the Oval Office in the days that followed in case someone tried to change his mind and disrupt the launch,” he wrote.
Kushner told Trump that Abbas refused to speak with him until after the plan came out, and they held a long discussion of the plan, at the end of which Trump said: “I trust you…If you think this is the right thing to do, let’s do it.”
More excerpts of Kushner’s book will be released on JPost.com on Tuesday and Friday.