Trump aides said to warn Obama against 11th hour ‘new adventures’ on Palestinian issue
Aides to US president-elect Donald Trump are reportedly warning President Barack Obama not to “even think about” trying to make a new push for progress on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the final weeks of his administration.Palestinian UN Envoy threatens Trump: If US Moves Embassy to Jerusalem We’ll ‘Make Their Life Miserable’
The outgoing president and his team “shouldn’t go seeking new adventures or pushing through policies that clearly don’t match Trump’s positions,” the Politico website reported an unnamed Trump “national security adviser” as insisting.
And that includes “efforts to bring peace to the Israelis and Palestinians — even if those initiatives are symbolic at best,” Politico wrote, noting that Trump “has made it very clear he will support Israel and its preferences.”
The Thursday report, which was headlined “Trump team warns Obama not to make major moves on foreign policy,” quoted Obama administration officials wondering about how much influence they could have on the incoming president and his team. “We are asking ourselves: Are we going to be able to have some influence on the transition team or not? There is so much unknown. Nobody really knows these people,” a State Department official was quoted as saying. “I’m not sure I need to feel defensive about what we are working on, but I think it’s important to explain it, and explain options, and to be willing to explore alternatives.”
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Prof. Miriam Elman had a post earlier today on Donald Trump’s promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Israel’s capitol, U.S. Embassy: Next Year in Jerusalem?
It’s worth highlighting one piece of news in that post, via Haaretz, Palestinian UN Envoy: If Trump Moves Embassy to Jerusalem We’ll ‘Make His Life Miserable’:
The Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said in Washington on Friday that if President-elect Donald Trump moves the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem the Palestinians would “make life miserable” for the United States at the United Nations.More...
“If people attack us by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, which is a violation of Security Council resolutions, it is a violation of resolution 181 of the UN general assembly that was drafted by the U.S. … it means they are showing belligerency towards us … If they do that nobody should blame us for unleashing all of the weapons that we have in the UN to defend ourselves and we have a lot of weapons in the UN,” Mansour said.
Mansour said that the Palestinian response to a move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem could not be a Security Council resolution because the United States would veto it. “Maybe I can’t have resolutions in the Security Council but I can make their lives miserable everyday with precipitating a veto on my admission as a member state. Italy in 1949 received 3 consecutive vetoes on its admission to the UN from the Soviet Union. These are the kind of things that I can do.”
