When Yasser Abed Rabbo led a four-man PLO delegation to meet with US Ambassador to Tunis Robert Peletru in 1988, the meeting was hailed as a huge breakthrough. After the 90-minute meeting, Abed Rabbo said, “We hope this dialogue will continue and we think it will continue.”

That first PLO-US meeting might be in the distant past now, but the current situation appears to be reversed. The American ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is now claiming to have secret back-channel talks with the Palestinians; the Palestinians are denying this vehemently.

Speaking Feb. 28 on the Qatari-based Al Jazeera news satellite station, Friedman claimed that the “back-channel” talks are substantive and have dealt with some of the issues seen as positive in the US President Donald Trump’s peace plan, “such as the two-state solution, a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, connecting the West Bank with the Gaza Strip and investment in infrastructure and increasing the size of land offered to the Palestinians,” the Jerusalem Post cited Friedman as saying to Al Jazeera.

The Palestinian response came quickly with government spokesman Ibrahim Melhem telling the official Palestinian WAFA news agency Feb. 29 that Friedman’s claims are simply not true. Instead, Melhem noted that the peace initiative offered by President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN included a rejection of the US plan and calls for “an international mechanism with the participation of the Quartet and the UN Security Council.”