London [U.K.]: The United States ambassador to the United Nations (UN) Nikki Haley has insisted that Washington “absolutely” supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestine conflict, 24 hours after President Donald Trump dropped U.S. commitment to the policy.
According to the Guardian, the conflicting messages coming out of the new US administration reflected policy chaos.
Earlier, 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. I can live with either one,” Trump said.
Meanwhile 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.”(ANI)