Pompeo is on a Middle East tour following a US-brokered accord between Israel and the United Arab Emirates to normalize relations announced on Aug. 13.

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"If we can help facilitate normalization with Bahrain we're ready," the official said.

On arrival in Bahrain, Pompeo said it was vital to seize the momentum of the deal. On this trip he has visited Jerusalem, Sudan, Bahrain, the UAE, and will head to Oman on Thursday.

Israel and the United States have said they are pushing more Arab countries to follow the UAE's path. Israel's intelligence minister has mentioned Bahrain as a possible candidate.

"I think that UAE's decision creates a climate that makes it easier for another country to follow, and more countries after that," the state department official on the tour said.

Bahrain welcomed the UAE-Israel accord soon after it was announced and said it raised the chances of peace.

The small island state of Bahrain houses the US Navy's Fifth Fleet, the US Naval Forces Central Command, and a British naval support facility. The International Maritime Security Construct, formed in 2019 to protect commercial shipping in the Gulf after a series of tanker attacks, is also based in Bahrain.

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Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa said he welcomed US efforts towards the Israel-UAE accord, noting "the importance of redoubling efforts to realize a just solution which utilizes peace as a strategic option to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict", state news agency BNA said.

On Twitter after meeting the crown prince, Pompeo said they discussed regional peace and stability and Gulf unity.

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The speeches by U.S. envoy for international negotiations Jason Greenblatt and top Palestinian diplomat Riad Malki at an informal Security Council meeting ended up focusing on much broader issues than the chosen topic – Israeli settlements at the "core" of the "obstruction of peace."

Greenblatt said it was "surprising and unfair" that Indonesia, Kuwait and South Africa organized the council meeting and condemned Israel's behavior when it "was not even invited to speak at this session." He added that it was "inspiring" to see Israel celebrate the 71st anniversary of its independence on Thursday, calling it "a small brave country" that grew to a "thriving, diverse economically vibrant democracy," the only one in the Mideast.

He called the council's "obsessive" focus on Israeli settlements a "farce," saying settlements aren't keeping Israel and the Palestinians from negotiating peace, and said the council should instead condemn Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad for recently firing hundreds of rockets into Israel from Gaza.

The council should also focus on the Palestinian practice of paying the families of terrorists rather than on how the United States could support the Palestinian Authority's budget, Greenblatt said. The Trump administration has drastically cut its support for the Palestinians to try to spur their return to negotiations.

The Palestinians pre-emptively rejected any peace proposal floated by the Trump administration amid concerns it would fall far below their hopes for an independent state in the West Bank, east Jerusalem – which they want as their capital – and Gaza. Their demand for a two-state solution is supported by the U.N. and almost all of its 193 member-states.

Malki told the council that after U.S. President Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel "in blatant violation of international law, it is not possible to have faith" in the peace plan, which was crafted over two years by a team led by Greenblatt and the president's senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

"Every decision the U.S. administration has taken since has simply confirmed its disregard for Palestinian lives, for Palestinian rights" and for the two-state solution, he said.

"We cannot afford not to engage with any peace efforts but the U.S. efforts cannot be characterized nor can qualify as peace efforts, unfortunately," Malki said. "All indicates this far that this is not a peace plan, but rather conditions for surrender – and there is no amount of money can make it acceptable."

Greenblatt and Kushner have been tight-lipped about the peace plan's contents.

Last week, Kushner said the blueprint attempts to ensure security for Israel and provide economic opportunity to improve the lives of Palestinians. The plan won't be released before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ends during the first week of June, and perhaps not even then.

Greenblatt told the Security Council "the vision for peace that we will soon put forward will be realistic and implementable" and "lay out the core issues of the conflict in enough detail that everyone will be able to imagine what peace could look like."

"This is the right package of compromises for both sides to take in order to leave the past behind and start a new chapter, where there could be tremendous hope and opportunity in the region," he added.

Greenblatt called on council members "to support the parties to get together to get behind this opportunity."

In the meantime, he said, "we will continue to speak the truth even when it is not welcome," starting with the U.N.'s failure to condemn the "vicious, cynical, unprovoked attack" from Gaza a few days ago "that was intended to terrify, kill and maim Israelis."

Malki, who spoke before Greenblatt, told reporters afterward that the U.S. envoy's remarks gave him no hope for the U.S. peace plan.

"I thought I was listening to an Israeli speaker ... rather than an American official," he said. "It seems that the American position has been totally taken by the Israeli position and right now the U.S. administration has no independent position."

Malki said Greenblatt "attacked the Palestinians and nothing else" and called Israel the only Mideast democracy while forgetting that Israel is the "only occupying power ... in the world."

"It's very clear that his thinking, his mind, is well set to be exclusively anti-Palestinian, anti-peace and anti-logic, and anti-international law," Malki said.

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Hosted by then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, Palestinian and Israeli leaders came together on Sept. 13, 1993 to sign the first of the Oslo Accords, designed to be the foundation of a permanent peace deal within five years that would create two states, side-by-side.

The three men who would win the Nobel Peace Prize the next year – Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres of Israel and Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat – did not live to see peace in their time.

Now, with relations between U.S. President Donald Trump and the Palestinians, who see him as an unquestioning ally of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government, at a breaking point, the Oslo deal seems like a relic from a bygone age.

As if to drive home the flaws inherent in Oslo's original Declaration of Principles, 25 years later it is the very issues that were postponed for later resolution that are now dominating the headlines once again.

They include the status of Jerusalem – claimed by both sides as their capital – the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees from wars dating to 1948, Israeli settlements on occupied land that Palestinians want for a state, mutually acceptable security arrangements, and the issue of agreed borders.

"I believe now that Oslo is dead," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, who was among the tiny circle of Palestinian politicians entrusted by Arafat with the secret that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators had begun meeting in Norway in 1992.

Now 73, Abed Rabbo concedes his side made mistakes. Now, few even talk of a peace process. Last month, support for a two-state solution fell to 43% among Israeli Jews and Palestinians in one opinion poll, the weakest in almost two decades of joint Palestinian-Israeli survey research.

"We should not mourn a ghost," Abed Rabbo said. "We should have a new strategy – not to abandon the right of self-determination for the Palestinian people, not to abandon the right to build our own independent state, but to try to find ways and means to reach that goal different from the ways and means that we have used in the past."

But Yossi Beilin, one of the Israeli negotiators in the Oslo talks, said the parameters of a final agreement are well-known.

"It shouldn't take too long, once the right people are in their positions, to cut a deal," Beilin, said.

"Trump is not a game-changer – he is a spoiler ... but he will not be there forever. And I believe that it is eventually, as it was in Oslo, up to the parties. If we and the Palestinians want to make peace, we will make peace."

Early challenges 

The early hope of peace shattered quickly after Rabin and Arafat awkwardly shook hands on the South Lawn of the White House.

Two years later, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli ultra-nationalist opposed to peace policies that had already been tested by the massacre of 29 Palestinian worshippers by a Jewish settler in the West Bank city of Hebron, and by suicide bombings by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist groups that killed 77 civilians and soldiers in Israel.

Over the years, peacemaking became mired in accusations of broken promises on both sides and more attacks by Palestinian terrorists and continued settlement expansion by Israel.

Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014. Trump has pledged a "deal of the century" to end the decades-old conflict, but his administration has given no date for the proposal's rollout.

For his part, Netanyahu has said that any future Palestinian state must be demilitarized and must recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people – conditions that Palestinians say show he is not sincere about peacemaking.

And Palestinians fumed when Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December and moved the U.S. Embassy there from Tel Aviv in May.

Both steps led the Palestinian leadership to boycott Washington's peace efforts spearheaded by Jared Kushner, Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law.

Further moves saw the Trump administration withhold hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to the U.N. refugee agency dealing with Palestinians and to hospitals in East Jerusalem, and the order to close the Palestine Liberation Organization's mission in Washington, which opened in 1994.

In Gaza, ruled by the Islamist terrorist group Hamas since 2007, two years after Israeli soldiers and settlers withdrew, one of the group's senior leaders, Mahmoud Al-Zahar, said the Oslo deal was not a peace pact but "100% surrender" for the Palestinians.

Lucy Bar-On, a 60-year-old Israeli nurse, said the failure to move forward along the peace path charted by the interim agreements only emboldened hardliners: "They won, the extremists on the Israeli side and those on the Palestinian side."

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