King Abdullah: Middle East security impossible without Palestinian state

September 20, 2023 — The Jerusalem Post reports: “Global solidarity is needed to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which remains the central security issue in the region, Jordan’s King Abdullah told the United Nations on Tuesday.

‘The region will continue to suffer until the world lifts the shadow of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the central issue in the Middle East.

No architecture for regional security and development can stand over the burning ashes of this conflict,’ the monarch said as he joined world leaders in taking the stage at the high-level portion of the 78th UN General Assembly’s opening session.

He spoke at a time when the Israeli government does not believe in the creation of a Palestinian state and many Israelis themselves have lost faith in it. Some members of the government consider a Palestinian state to be an existential threat to Israel…”  (Caroline B. Glick, senior contributing editor to The Jerusalem Post wrote a book in 2014 entitled “The Israeli Solution” where she stated in the preface: “Establishing a Palestinian state, so the thinking goes, would be a panacea for all the region’s ills.  It would end the Arab world’s conflict with Israel, because the reason the Arab world is anti-Israel is that there is no Palestinian state.  It would also nearly erase the Arab world’s anti-Americanism, because the reason the Arabs – and the larger Muslim world – are anti-American is that the United States supports Israel even though there is no Palestinian state…  For the past ninety years, the two-state solution has been tried more than a dozen times, and every time it has failed, abysmally.  Between 1970 and 2013, the United States presented nine different peace plans for Israel and the Palestinians, all based on the two-state solution – and for the past twenty years, the two-state solution has been the centerpiece of the U.S. Middle East policy.  But despite this laser focus, American efforts to implement the two-state solution have all been dismal failures.”  See the next two reports.)

Only way to solve conflict is independent Palestinian state, says top Saudi diplomat

September 19, 2023 — The Times of Israel reports: “The Saudi foreign minister said Monday that the only way to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is via an independent Palestinian state, amid talks on Israeli-Saudi normalization in which Riyadh has been seeking Israeli gestures toward Ramallah.

‘There is no way to resolve the conflict other than by ensuring the establishment of an independent Palestinian state,’ Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan told Saudi state TV network Al Ekhbariya.

‘People have begun to lose hope in the two-state solution,’ Farhan said, adding that the plan ‘must return to the forefront.’

Farhan’s remarks were made at the sidelines of a United Nations General Assembly event dubbed the ‘Peace Day Effort,’ in which nearly 30 foreign ministers from countries in Europe and the Middle East met Monday to unveil a new initiative aimed at reviving the long-dormant Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Driven by the European Union, Saudi Arabia, the Arab League, Egypt and Jordan, the sides agreed at the event to produce a ‘Peace Supporting Package’ in the coming months that will maximize dividends for Israelis and Palestinians, once they reach a peace agreement…”

Saudis say Palestinians must be part of Israel peace deal, says Blinken

September 14, 2023 — The Jerusalem Post reports: “Saudi Arabia has let the Biden administration know that resolving Palestinian issues is critical for any normalization deal with Israel, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Wednesday.

‘It is also clear from what we hear from the Saudis that if this process is to move forward the Palestinian piece is going to be very important too,’ he said in an interview with the podcast ‘Pod Save the World.’

He spoke as the Biden administration has been increasingly public about its pursuit of a security pact with Saudi Arabia that would include a normalization deal with Israel. It’s expected that Israel would have to make concessions to the Palestinians as part of the deal.

Such a deal would come on top of the US-backed 2020 Abraham Accords, in which Israel agreed to suspend the annexation of West Bank settlement in exchange for normalization deals with four Arab countries: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan…”