A rocky start for “the deal of the century”

June 25, 2019: Jared Kushner (C), senior advisor and son-in-law to U.S. President Donald Trump, discusses his economic plan for the Palestinians with IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde in Manama, Bahrain (source: dpa)

General info

Location

Israel

Date

11 July 2019

Contains

Report Scenarios

Tags

development diplomacy Donald Trump foreign investment foreign policy Hamas IMF investors Islam Mahmoud Abbas

Author

Ambassador Zvi Mazel

Zvi Mazel is a former Israeli diplomat. He served as deputy director general in Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in charge of African Affairs from 1993 to 1996. He also served as Israel’s ambassador to Romania from 1989 to 1992, ...

Critics underrate the realism of the Trump administration’s peace plan for the Middle East
The Manama workshop was intended to show investors a new approach may work
Whether it does depends on how Palestinian public opinion swings on the West Bank

President Donald Trump’s administration unveiled the economic part of its proposed solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, at the“Peace to Prosperity” economic workshop on June 25-26.

Finance ministers and business executives from around the world were invited to contribute to a $50 billion investment program to provide better conditions to the Palestinians and help the economies of neighboring Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon. The idea was to induce more Palestinian flexibility in future negotiations on the political aspects of the plan, to be unveiled at a later date – in all likelihood this autumn, after Israeli holds a new round of parliamentary elections in November.