{"id":23538,"date":"2018-11-28T05:25:00","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T05:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=23538"},"modified":"2018-11-28T05:25:00","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T05:25:00","slug":"israel-urged-to-reverse-confiscation-of-church-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=23538","title":{"rendered":"Israel urged to reverse confiscation of church land"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nNEW YORK: US President Donald Trump\u2019s administration has told Israel that it will present its long-awaited Middle East peace plan early next year, Israel\u2019s UN envoy said Tuesday.<\/p>\n

\nIsraeli Ambassador Danny Danon told journalists that the peace plan was \u201ccompleted\u201d and that the administration had discussed timing with Israel to unveil the proposals.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cAs far as we know, they speak with us about the beginning of 2019, which is coming soon,\u201d Danon said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know the details of the plan but we know that it is completed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe ambassador said early next year was considered the best timing because it will be several months before expected elections in Israel.<\/p>\n

\nA rollout of the peace plan in early 2019 will allow Trump to \u201cpresent it without interfering in our political debate in Israel,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\nIsrael will come to the negotiating table to discuss the plan, Danon said, but the Palestinians will try to block it even as the US tries to bring other key countries on board.<\/p>\n

\nThe Palestinians have severed ties with the Trump administration after his December decision to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and declare the city Israel\u2019s capital.<\/p>\n

\nThe US administration has also cut more than $500 million in Palestinian aid.<\/p>\n

\nThe Palestinians see the city as the capital of their future state. International consensus has been that Jerusalem\u2019s status must be negotiated between the two sides.<\/p>\n

\nTrump said in September that he planned to unveil the peace plan by the end of the year, and has suggested that the proposals could provide for the creation of a Palestinian state.<\/p>\n

\nDanon said he did not know if the two-state solution was included in the US plan.<\/p>\n

\nTrump\u2019s son-in-law Jared Kushner and lawyer Jason Greenblatt, who have led efforts to draft the plan, traveled to the region several times for talks on the proposals.<\/p>\n

\nGreenblatt said in an October interview with the Times of Israel news site that the plan would \u201cbe heavily focused on Israeli security needs\u201d while remaining \u201cfair to the Palestinians.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\u201cEach side will find things in this plan that they don\u2019t like.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nUS President Donald Trump said in September he would unveil a new peace plan within months.<\/p>\n

\nPalestinian president Mahmoud Abbas accuses Trump of bias toward Israel and refers mockingly to his evolving peace program as \u201cthe deal of the century.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nThe peace plan, Greenblatt said, \u201cwill include a resolution to all of the core issues, including the refugee issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nHe said that it would not propose a Palestinian-Jordanian confederation as a possible solution \u2014 something that Abbas has been reported as saying Greenblatt and Trump\u2019s senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner sounded him out about at a meeting last month.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cWe\u2019re not looking at a confederation model,\u201d Greenblatt said in Monday\u2019s interview.<\/p>\n

\nAn end to Israeli occupation and a sovereign, independent state of their own is at the heart of Palestinian demands.<\/p>\n

\nIsrael, however, says it must retain a security buffer between the West Bank and neighboring Jordan and Israeli officials speak of an undefined \u201cstate-minus\u201d or \u201cless-than-state\u201d for the Palestinians.<\/p>\n

\nAccording to Israeli activists who met Abbas in September, the Palestinian leader said he had told Greenblatt and Kushner that he would only be interested in a confederation if Israel joined too.<\/p>\n

\nHis response was seen as a way of torpedoing the proposal since Israel would be highly unlikely to agree.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK: US President Donald Trump\u2019s administration has told Israel that it will present its long-awaited Middle East peace plan early next year, Israel\u2019s UN envoy said Tuesday. Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon told journalists that the peace plan was \u201ccompleted\u201d and that the administration had discussed timing with Israel to unveil the proposals. \u201cAs far…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":23539,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23538"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23538\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23539"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}