Jared Kushner, senior advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump, said that Washington's Middle East peace plan would not follow the Arab Peace Initiative, a proposal for ending the Arab-Israeli conflict endorsed by the Arab League in 2002, Qatari network Al Jazeera reported Tuesday.
Kushner made the remarks in his interview with Al Jazeera just ahead of his departure for a U.S.-led economic workshop over the peace plan, better known as the "Deal of the Century," which will kick off in the Bahraini capital of Manama later in the day.
The "Deal of the Century" will lie "somewhere between the Arab peace initiative and the Israeli position," said Kushner, also Trump's son-in-law and main designer of the U.S. Middle East peace plan.
The Palestinian Authority has repeatedly called for the boycott of both the economic workshop and the "Deal of the Century," insisting that the political solution come first, while Israel is reported to have only sent a small business delegation to the Bahrain workshop.
Backed by the UN resolutions, the Palestinians seek to establish an independent, fully sovereign state along the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital.
It is worth noting that the Bahraini economic workshop comes on the same day that the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East is holding a pledging conference in New York.
The U.S. government under Trump has halted all funding for the UN relief agency, plunging it into a widening budget gap.
