Middle East peace initiative gets worse
09/06/19 09:20 AM
By Steve Benen
... Trump’s point man on the issue quit – before the White House’s Middle East peace plan is even unveiled ...
Jason Greenblatt, the president’s first envoy for negotiating a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, was a curious choice from the outset ... Greenblatt wasn’t a diplomat or an expert in international affairs; he’s Trump’s former real-estate lawyer and a former longtime employee of the Trump Organization ...
The new White House envoy for brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal is Avi Berkowitz, a 29-year-old lawyer, who graduated from law school in 2016, and who happens to be friends with the president’s nearly-as-young son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whose own efforts in this area have flailed for months.
I’ll just go ahead and state the obvious for the record: Avi Berkowitz has no experience in foreign policy or international diplomacy, and to expect him to have the skills and stature necessary to negotiate an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians is ridiculous ...
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/trumps-middle-east-peace-initiative-gets-just-little-worse
