Abbas eyes Merkel as Plan B if Trump fails on Mideast peace

A senior Palestinian minister close to President Mahmoud Abbas told Al-Monitor that the Palestinian leadership is ready to seriously engage with the Trump administration on moving ahead with plans for a regional deal for Palestinian-Israeli peace. The senior PLO official said on condition of anonymity, "We are showing great flexibility, as directed by President Abbas, on the phrasing of the condition to freeze settlement construction — restraining it to the existing built areas of settlements." 

He added, "We are not rigid on the outlines for opening a regional peace conference. Abbas is ready to start serious permanent status negotiations with [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu and his team, beginning with borders and security — where both sides will have to show their respective maps — and with a parallel process of normalizing Arab states’ relations with Israel.”

The minister acknowledged that it is the Palestinian leadership’s decision to give President Donald Trump, as the leader of the free world, the chance to seriously intervene with his strong negotiation skills in favor of a two-state solution. As part of this strategy, Abbas is fully coordinating with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Jordanian King Abdullah II and Saudi King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. According to Palestinian sources, a special Abbas envoy visited Riyadh last week, in the midst of the crisis with Qatar, to coordinate positions and the insertion of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative into the negotiation process. “Our proactive strategy is producing positive dividends in terms of Trump’s adviser’s more positive attitude to Ramallah, and in terms of Netanyahu's being increasingly on the defensive,” the minister said.

The minister believes there are chances for a renewal of the peace process under the auspices of Trump. Yet, given Trump’s domestic troubles and Netanyahu’s positions, he believes Ramallah must have a fallback position in the diplomatic realm. “Unlike many others in the international community, the Palestinian president has not given up on Donald Trump," he said. "But should Trump disappoint, like others in the international community, we have decided to opt for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in conjunction with French President Emmanuel Macron, to take the lead in preventing a deadlock in the peace process." He grinned when he said, “As in Leonard Cohen’s famous song: ‘First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.'"