Jared Kushner is traveling to the Middle East this week to work toward a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
A White House official said the senior aide and son-in-law to President Donald Trump will arrive on Wednesday for meetings in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Jason Greenblatt, Trump’s international envoy, will arrive on Monday.
Trump made a personal appeal for peace during a visit to Jerusalem last month. He has cast Middle East peace as the ‘ultimate deal.’
Former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all tried and failed to achieve a peace deal.
The White House official – who was not authorized to speak publicly about the trip – said an agreement will take time.
The president’s son-in-law’s new peace push comes after Trump made his first foreign trip and included stops in Jerusalem and Bethlehem, meeting Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.
The president made no mention in his visits of the ‘two-state solution’, the idea of Palestine and Israel coming to a peaceful co-existence with statehood for Palestinians which has been the key principle behind every effort made by successive U.S. presidents since Clinton.