1 \ President Trump's senior adviser Jared Kushner briefed senators behind closed doors today on the Trump administration's Middle East peace plan, White House officials tell me
2 \ Palestinian leaders rejected the plan, as expected, but Kushner told a bipartisan group from the Senate Foreign Relations committee that the international reaction was otherwise encouraging. His briefing was part of an effort to build support for the plan in Washington
3 \ Using a power point presentation, Kushner pointed to two factors making a solution harder to reach: increased dependence of Palestinian leaders on foreign aid, and increasing expansion by Israeli leaders of settlements in the West Bank 
4 \ A White House official told me: "Kushner’s message was that every time negotiations failed the Palestinians got more money and Israel was able to keep expending the settlements, but the peace process became a false notion and didn’t solve anything"
5 \ The presentation was the same one Kushner used two weeks ago at a closed meeting of the UN Security Council. His main argument is that the status quo is broken and something else has to be tried
6 \ Kushner argued in his presentation that the lingering Israeli-Palestinian conflict is used as a pretext for more radicalization in the Middle East
7 \ Kushner told senators the White House wanted to use the plan not only to try to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also to bring Israel and the Arab and Muslim worlds closer together
8 \ Kushner also presented the senators with a list of reforms he said the Palestinians must undertake to achieve statehood and reduce the risk of creating a failed state in the West Bank and Gaza
9 \ The Palestinians consider the plan a non-starter, but Kushner emphasized that there were indications it could still move forward. A White House official slammed the Palestinian response to the plan, telling me: "they don't have a real detailed idea of what they want."
10 \ The White House official told me: "It has exposed the Palestinian leadership who is defending the status quo. We are moving the debate to discussing the technical challenges and the details as opposed to romanticizing about things that people know will never happen". END
