In June, the United Nations planned to convene a conference on the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Led by France and Saudi Arabia, the assembled nations were expected to agree to recognize a Palestinian state and call for a renewed peace process, presumably based on the 2002 Saudi-led Arab Peace Initiative, which proposed full peace between the Arab states and Israel after the creation of a Palestinian state.
Israel repeatedly condemned the conference, and the United States was less than enthusiastic. “We are urging governments not to participate in the conference,” read a cable sent in June by the State Department in Washington to U.S. embassies around the world, according to Reuters. “The United States opposes any steps that would unilaterally recognize a conjectural Palestinian state, which adds significant legal and political obstacles to the eventual resolution of the conflict and could coerce Israel during a war, thereby supporting its enemies,” the cable stated.
The Trump administration had a more fundamental objection to the conference: it opposes not merely the recognition of a Palestinian state but also the establishment of such a state. “Unless there are some significant things that happen that change the culture, there’s no room for it,” said Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, in an interview with Bloomberg News, adding that he did not expect to see such an outcome “in our lifetime.” And if such a state ever emerges, he suggested, it should not be located in the Palestinian territories that Israel occupies but should instead be carved out of “a Muslim country.”
Just days before the conference was supposed to begin, Israel carried out a series of airstrikes on Iran. The resulting 12-day war, which the United States eventually joined, overshadowed the Israeli-Palestinian issue and made it logistically impossible to move forward with the conference, which was postponed. “This postponement cannot undermine our determination to move forward with the implementation of the two-state solution,” French President Emmanuel Macron told a news conference. “Whatever the circumstances,” he added, “I have stated my determination to recognize the state of Palestine.”
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