The Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, delivered an angry rejection of President Trump’s plan for peace between Palestinians and Israelis at the United Nations on Tuesday, describing it as an illegitimate, one-sided proposal that rewarded Israel for decades of occupation and turned his people’s land into “Swiss cheese” riddled with Israeli settlements.
In a speech at the Security Council, Mr. Abbas categorically repudiated everything about the plan, which Mr. Trump unveiled with great fanfare two weeks ago in Washington with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel at his side. The plan would give Israel most of what it wanted while offering the Palestinians the possibility of a state with limited sovereignty.
Mr. Abbas, along with many nations, including members of the Arab League and the European Union, publicly rejected the plan soon after it was announced. But his visit to the United Nations Security Council, the venue for many angry confrontations over the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict, reinforced his determination to ensure the plan would never be considered, even as a basis for reviving negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
“This is an Israeli-American pre-emptive plan in order to put an end to the question of Palestine,” Mr. Abbas said.
Mr. Trump’s plan, which he had repeatedly delayed releasing, would guarantee that Israel controlled a unified Jerusalem as its capital and not require it to uproot any of the settlements in the West Bank, established since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, that have provoked Palestinian outrage and alienated much of the world.
“This plan will not bring peace or stability to the region,” Mr. Abbas told the Security Council. “It’s like Swiss cheese, really. Who among you will accept a similar state and conditions? This deal, ladies and gentlemen, includes the entrenchment of occupation and strengthening the apartheid regime that we thought we got rid of a long time ago.”
Mr. Trump’s plan also would deny the Palestinians their longstanding demand to create a capital in the eastern part of Jerusalem, instead giving them Abu Dis, an unimposing suburb of the holy city separated from it by a concrete Israeli-built security barrier.
Mr. Trump vowed to provide $50 billion in international investment to help build the new Palestinian entity and open an embassy in its new state.
Mr. Abbas’s speech was sharply criticized by Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, who told the Security Council that the Palestinian leader was not interested in peace talks.
“If President Abbas was serious about negotiating, he wouldn’t be here in New York, he would be in Jerusalem,” Mr. Danon said. “Complaining instead of leading, that is Abbas’s way.”
Before Mr. Abbas spoke, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres addressed the council and reaffirmed the 193-member organization’s commitment to the longstanding pledge for a solution that envisioned two states “living side by side in peace and security within recognized borders on the basis of the pre-1967 lines.”
A poll released Tuesday found that Mr. Abbas’s position had widespread support among Palestinians, with 94 percent opposed to the Trump plan.
The poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research also found support among Palestinians for a two-state solution to the conflict had fallen to less than 40 percent, its lowest level since the signing of the first Oslo agreement in 1993.
Nearly two thirds favored waging an armed struggle against the Israeli occupation.
The survey of 1,270 adults was conducted last week and has a margin of error of 3 percent.
After his Security Council speech, Mr. Abbas made a brief press appearance in New York with Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, who in 2008 had negotiated with Mr. Abbas the outlines of a peace plan that would have been far more generous to the Palestinian side than the proposal made by Mr. Trump.
The meeting of Mr. Olmert and Mr. Abbas in front of television cameras, which the Palestinians had sought, appeared designed to show that Mr. Abbas was open to engaging with Israelis like Mr. Olmert, if not Mr. Netanyahu.
Mr. Abbas took no questions and departed after telling Mr. Olmert that “I extend my hand to the Israeli people” and praising him as a “man of peace.”
Mr. Olmert, who thanked Mr. Abbas, said he had not come to the United States to criticize Mr. Trump’s plan, and he emphasized what he called its one positive element: its endorsement of the principle of two states.
“I hope the Palestinians will not ignore that there is a commitment for a two-state solution,” Mr. Olmert said, and he predicted that negotiations between Mr. Abbas and the Israelis would inevitably resume.
As to who might represent the Israeli side in such negotiations, Mr. Olmert was coy, pointing to Israeli elections in March — the third in the past year — which could end Mr. Netanyahu’s tenure after more than a decade in power.
“The representative of Israel is the prime minister of Israel, whoever he will be,” Mr. Olmert said. “Right now it is Netanyahu. A month from now, I don’t know.”