Kushner: Without peace plan, settlements will expand beyond point of return

Senior White House adviser Jared Kushner said Saturday that if the Palestinians leadership does not agree to work with the peace proposal recently unveiled by the Trump administration, Israeli settlements will continue to expand, making it impossible to establish a Palestinian state.

“What’s been happening for many years is that Israel has been expanding as they’ve been negotiating and negotiating and there has not been a resolution to the conflict,” Kushner told Egyptian journalist Amr Adeeb during an interview on the El-Hakaya news show.

Kushner, who was one of the main architects behind the Trump plan, said that the US was working on reaching an agreement with Israel under which it would recognize Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank, thereby allowing for Jerusalem to move forward with annexation plans.

He told El-Hakaya that the agreement under which the US will recognize Israeli land in the West Bank “will take a couple of months” during which the sides will survey “every inch” of the territory.

“This is land that they [the Israelis] are never going to leave anyway because they have their people there,” Kushner said, clarifying that the US recognition would be “in exchange for them [Israelis] stopping growing.”

“Because I’ll tell you that… if we didn’t do this, Israel will continue to grow at this pace and there will never be an opportunity to create a Palestinian state,” he asserted.

— Jacob Magid