Trump, Meeting With Netanyahu, Backs Away From Palestinian State

President Trump said on Wednesday that the United States would no longer insist on a Palestinian state as part of a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, backing away from a policy that has underpinned America’s role in Middle East peacemaking since the Clinton administration.

“I’m looking at two-state and one-state” formulations, Mr. Trump said, appearing in a joint news conference at the White House with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. “I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like. I can live with either one.”

Mr. Trump’s comments were a striking departure from two decades of diplomatic orthodoxy, and they raised a host of thorny questions about the viability of his position. The Palestinians are highly unlikely to accept anything short of a sovereign state, and a single Israeli state encompassing the Palestinians would either become undemocratic or no longer Jewish, given the faster growth rate of the Arab population.

Mr. Trump did not address these dynamics, preferring to focus on his confidence that he could produce a breakthrough agreement. “I think we’re going to make a deal,” Mr. Trump said, describing that as personally important to him. “It might be a better and better deal than people in this room even understand.”

But even as Mr. Trump drastically reoriented American policy, he told Mr. Netanyahu to stop building new housing in the West Bank for the moment. “I’d like to see you hold back on settlements for a little bit,” he told Mr. Netanyahu, whose government has been racing to announce new settlement construction in the weeks since Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

The president also stressed that Israel would have to be flexible in any future peace talks. “As with any successful negotiation, both sides will have to make compromises,” Mr. Trump said.

Turning to Mr. Netanyahu, he asked, “You know that, right?”

Mr. Netanyahu responded with a smile. “Both sides,” he said, pointedly emphasizing the first word.

Nonetheless, Mr. Netanyahu, who nominally supports a two-state solution, quickly embraced Mr. Trump’s declaration, saying he preferred to deal with “substance” rather than “labels” in negotiating with the Palestinians.

Mr. Trump and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, have been exploring an approach called the outside-in strategy, enlisting Arab states in the region that already have found common cause with Israel against their mutual enemy Iran to help broker a settlement with the Palestinians. But it is not at all clear that Palestinians would ever accept an arrangement that did not leave them with a state of their own.

Until now, Mr. Trump’s team has largely avoided conversations with Palestinian leaders. But Mike Pompeo, the C.I.A. director, met with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, in Ramallah in the West Bank on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.

The idea of an independent Palestinian state comprising the West Bank and Gaza became the central theme of Middle East peacemaking in the 1990s after the Oslo accords were signed. Bill Clinton was the first president to endorse a two-state solution, saying in a speech in January 2001, just two weeks before leaving office, that the conflict would never be settled without “a sovereign, viable Palestinian state.”

His successor, George W. Bush, picked that up later that year, becoming the first president to make it official American policy. Mr. Obama considered a two-state solution the unquestionable bedrock of Washington’s approach to the region.

But momentum for the idea of side-by-side states has ebbed not just in Washington but the region, where many Israelis and Palestinians have given up hope or changed their minds about the concept.

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