In a meeting last month with UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres US president Donald Trump described Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu as “the harder side to convince in his efforts to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal” according to Haaretz newspaper.
“Trump said both leaders are problematic” a Western diplomat who was briefed on the meeting said on condition of anonymity. “But the general context was that from the two of them Netanyahu is the bigger problem.”
On September 19 Trump held a 15-minute meeting with Guterres on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York.
According to six Western diplomats and one former senior Israeli official at least half of the meeting dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
Trump who had met with Netanyahu in New York the previous day gave Guterres his impressions of that meeting and his own views on the peace process.
An informed Western diplomat said Trump reiterated to Guterres that he was determined to try to advance a historic peace deal and that over the years he had made many difficult deals but he had always heard that the hardest deal of all was the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and he wanted to try to meet this challenge.
According to the diplomat Trump also told Guterres that Netanyahu was more of an obstacle to peace efforts in the Middle East than Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas
Trump described Abbas as “a very old (82) man who suffers from domestic political problems and needs a legacy to leave behind” stressing that he would never have a president more understanding of Israel’s security needs than Abbas.
He expressed his belief that there was a chance that Abbas would agree to steps he had not agreed to in the past.
