U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley accused the Palestinians of begging and badmouthing the United States in an interview with Fox News, Wednesday.
Asked by host Bret Baier whether she thought the tougher policy adopted by the United States toward the Palestinians, including cuts to U.S. aid and the closure of the PLO mission in Washington, would help bring Ramallah back to the negotiating table, Haley said, "It's totally up to the Palestinians at this point. If the leadership of the Palestinians came to the table, automatically you're going to have a peace plan. Negotiations are going to happen."
While Haley admitted neither Jerusalem nor Ramallah would like the deal, she said the "Palestinians have more to gain [from negotiations] than Israel ever will."
"All they have done is had their hand out asking for money, badmouthed the United States, not come to the table on the peace deal. Why would we have a PLO office? Why would we continue to fund the Palestinians?" she asked.
Haley said Palestinian recalcitrance would not stop U.S. efforts toward reaching a peace
"We're moving forward, we're going to continue to push it," she said. "We're going to continue to hope that they see the error of what they've done and they come back to the table and we'll welcome them when they do."
As for the threat posed by the ayatollahs' regime in Tehran, Haley said, "Iran is absolutely the spoiler in Syria."
"We see they're trying to be a threat to Israel. They're creating proxy wars all over the Middle East, and it's all the reason why we got out of the Iran deal, because we were funneling a lot of money to continue these bad aspects. We cut them off Aug 7. We'll put sanctions back [in force] on Nov. 5. We're going to hit their oil, we're going to hit their foreign banks, and so they're really going to start to feel it."
At the end of the day, Haley cautioned, "nothing is going to fix Iran until Iran fixes itself."
"Iran is feeling the pain. They feel weak. And we are suffocating them to the point that they have to address ballistic missiles; they have to address their support on terrorism.
"Our focus is on the Iranian people. I mean they have protested, they have spoken out, they have said they want a better life. I think our main focus is obviously on the Iranian regime as well as on the IRGC [Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps] specifically. And I think that they have to make a decision. But at the end of the day, we can't allow them to have any nuclear programs," Haley said.
