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By Julian Borger
The US ambassador to the United Nations has insisted that Washington “absolutely” supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, 24 hours after Donald Trump dropped US commitment to the policy.
The conflicting messages coming out of the new US administration reflected policy chaos in a week when the national security adviser was forced to resign over his contacts with Russia, and factions inside the White House continue to vie for dominance.
In Bonn, the French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, emerged from his first meeting with the new US secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, to describe the Trump administration’s Middle East policy as “confused and worrying”.
Ayrault pointed to Trump’s remarks in a joint appearance with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in which he explicitly abandoned the two decades-long US commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel as part of a final peace deal.
“I’m looking at two-state and one-state, and I like the one that both parties like. I’m very happy with the one that both parties like,” Trump said. “I can live with either one.”
After his meeting with Tillerson at the sidelines of a G20 meeting, Ayrault said: “I wanted to remind him after the meeting between Donald Trump and Netanyahu that in France’s view, there are no other options other than the perspective of a two-state solution and that the other option which Tillerson brought up was not realistic, fair or balanced.”
He did not give details about the option that Tillerson raised and the secretary of state did not take press questions, but he appears to have echoed Trump’s remarks suggesting other outcomes would be acceptable to the US.
“I found that there was a bit more precision even if I found that on the Israeli-Palestinian dossier it was very confused and worrying,” Ayrault told reporters. He also noted differences over the 2015 international nuclear deal with Iran, with the Trump administration wanting to review it “from scratch”.
Meanwhile the US ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, was adamant that US policy on Israeli-Palestinian issues had not changed.
“First of all, the two-state solution is what we support. Anybody that wants to say the United States does not support the two-state solution – that would be an error,” she told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York. Referring to Trump’s comments, she said: “We absolutely support the two-state solution, but we are thinking out of the box as well.”
Adding to the confusion, Trump used his meeting with Netanyahu to urge him publicly to restrain Israeli settlement building on the West Bank. But his nominee for the US ambassadorship, his former bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, has been a long-term supporter of expanded settlements and even annexation of the West Bank.
At his Senate confirmation hearing on Thursday, Friedman distanced himself from many of his past policy positions and comments on the Middle East, including his rejection of a two-state solution.
“If Israelis and Palestinians are able to achieve a two-state solution, I would be delighted,” he said, noting there was no “appetite among Palestinians” for a one-state solution. He added he no longer supported the annexation of the West Bank.
He repeatedly apologised for past verbal attacks on liberal American Jews, including the branding of Barack Obama and the state department as antisemitic and the description of the liberal Jewish advocacy group, J Street, as “worse than kapos” (Jews forced to act as guards in Nazi concentration camps).
“There is no excuse for my offensive comments. I deeply regret them. They don’t reflect my character,” Friedman said.
Republicans on the committee indicated they were likely to support Friedman’s nomination, all but assuring his eventual confirmation.
But the committee chairman, Senator Bob Corker, asked why he wanted the job so much if it meant “you have to recant every single strong held belief you’ve had”.
Friedman replied: “This is something I want to do because I think I can do it well and there is nothing more important to me than strengthening the bond between the US and Israel.”
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