Abbas rejects Bahrain workshop

RAMALLAH, Palestine - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas announced on Saturday that Palestine will not participate in the US-sponsored economic workshop to be held next week in Manama, Bahrain.

Abbas stressed that "we reject the US peace plan", better known as the "Deal of the Century", in a meeting with the leaders of the Fatah Youth Movement in Ramallah.

"Jerusalem and Palestine are not for sale," Abbas told the leaders, adding that "the Palestinian leadership is sticking to the stable legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state".

Meanwhile, dozens of Palestinians organized a sit-in in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Saturday in protest against the regional workshop in which the Trump administration intends to unveil the economic part of its long-awaited plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Various Palestinian political parties and factions behind the protest said they were calling for mass protests against the workshop, attempting to thwart it.

Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesperson for Abbas, said in a statement that the US ideas for Middle East peace were "minimized into a workshop and may only emerge as a paper outside the framework of international law and Arab legitimacy" due to Palestinians' firm position against it.

"The real aim of this economic paper is to avoid political negotiations on the basis of international legitimacy, which will eventually lead to an impasse," he added.

A member of the national factions' secretariat, Salah Khawaja and one of the protest organizers, said that this sit-in and the following protests are "a unified Palestinian message", and that they are called by all national factions and various constituents of the Palestinian civil society.

He affirmed that the protests will reach the peak when the workshop was held next week.

Spokesperson for Abbas' Fatah party, Osama Qawasmi, said that the US peace deal is a "disgrace" and the protests are intended to go global.

Qawasmi said that "complementary to the political and diplomatic efforts, the protest activities will be mobilized by Palestinian communities around the world, including Palestinians living in Israel and Palestinian territories".

The Palestinians have also urged Arab countries to boycott the meeting, saying the entire plan ignores the two-state solution and deprives them of a future capital in east Jerusalem.

The US is planning to soon present the peace plan for resolving the conflict in the Middle East. The Palestinians have rejected it.

Xinhua - Ap

(China Daily Global 06/17/2019 page7)