Romney Meets With Palestinians’ Salam Fayyad
Mitt Romney held a brief meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad this afternoon, but in Ramallah it is being viewed as a small gesture in an Israel-dominated trip.
Romney raised Palestinian eyebrows by asking only to meet Fayyad and not Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. He requested the meeting in Jerusalem and not in Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority and an integral part of Barack Obama’s schedule when he visited the Middle East on his 2008 campaign trail. And his meeting with Fayyad was scheduled to be far briefer than his meetings with Israeli leaders.
Officials in Ramallah say matter-of-factly that they expected nothing different, seeing Palestinians and Israeli-Palestinian relations as very marginal during this trip, as they think it’s just about courting the Jewish vote.
One senior Palestinian Authority figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject, told the Forward: “He’s coming to launch his electoral campaign and play for the Jewish vote as it tends to go to the Democrats” and said that the peace process “hardly” features in his priorities for the visit.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
