In Trump’s chat with TIME he talks tough…to Israel
In his interview to TIME magazine’s Senior Political Correspondent Eric Cortellessa, Donald Trump makes some quite remarkable statements about the Palestinian issue. And guess what, hardly anyone noticed, at least initially!
Other than Politico and The Times of Israel.
The BBC thought Mr Trump’s decision to call off trade talks with Canada was a bigger story!
Seriously? Even though this US president vehemently indicated he would hold Israel’s feet to the fire on some of the key issues to do with the Palestinian question right now.
Consider this.
First and foremost, Mr Trump summarily dismissed Israeli efforts to annex the West Bank.
He said: “It won’t happen. It won’t happen. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. And you can’t do that now. We’ve had great Arab support. It won’t happen because I gave my word to the Arab countries. It will not happen. Israel would lose all of its support from the United States if that happened”.
Second, Mr Trump admitted that his administration is discussing whether to call for Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti’s release after 23 years in prison.
This admission came after the TIME correspondent asked who Mr Trump thought “currently leads the Palestinians”. The US president had said “They don’t have a leader right now, at least a visible leader, and they don’t really want to, because every one of those leaders has been shot and killed. It’s not a hot job”.
Upon which, the journalist pointed out that Mr Barghouti “is seen by many as the one figure who could unite Palestinians behind a two-state solution”. He added that Estee Lauder heir and Trump supporter Ron Lauder recently encouraged Israel to let Mr Barghouti out of prison.
Mr Trump responded with apparent candour: “I am literally being confronted with that question about 15 minutes before you called. That was the question. That was my question of the day. So I’ll be making a decision”.
And finally, Mr Trump said he planned to visit Gaza. “I will. Yeah, I will. You know, we have the Board of Peace, and it’s set up. They asked me to be the chairman. It was not something I wanted to do, believe me, but the Board of Peace is going to be a very powerful group of people, and it’s going to have a lot of power in terms of the Middle East. The Middle East has never been brought together. It’s really been brought together now, other than Hamas, which is a fringe group, and Hamas has, in theory, been brought together too, they signed the document”.
