SDE BOKER, Israel — US Secretary of State
Antony Blinken and the top diplomats of Israel
and four Arab states wrapped up a landmark meeting Monday vowing to boost
cooperation, which Israel said would send a strong message to its arch foe
Iran.
اضافة اعلان
The talks
brought together for the first time on Israeli soil the foreign ministers of
the UAE, Bahrain, and
Morocco — which all normalized ties with Israel in 2020 —
and of Egypt, which made peace with Israel in 1979.
Israel’s Foreign
Minister Yair Lapid said that “this new architecture, the shared capabilities
we are building, intimidates and deters our common enemies — first and foremost
Iran and its proxies”.
“They certainly
have something to fear,” he said about
Iran, which Israel is fighting in a
regional shadow war and which it accuses of seeking a nuclear bomb, a goal Iran
denies pursuing.
UAE Foreign
Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan called the two-day gathering “historic”
and said that “what we are trying to achieve here is changing the narrative,
creating a different future.”
The meeting’s Sunday opening, in the Sde Boker kibbutz
in the Negev desert, was marred by a shooting attack in northern Israel that
killed two police officers and was claimed by Daesh, which has rarely managed
to stage attacks inside Israel.
And early
Monday, Prime Minister
Naftali Bennett’s office confirmed he had caught Covid,
a day after he held closed-door meetings with Blinken followed by a joint press
conference without masks.
Iran nuclear deal
The talks on restoring the 2015 Iran nuclear deal were high on the
agenda at the Negev gathering and in Blinken’s meetings with Israeli officials.
The
EU’s foreign
policy chief said at the weekend that an agreement with Iran to restore the
so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) could be reached “in a
matter of days”.
That has raised
concern in Israel and across much of the Middle East, where many US-allied Arab
states view Iran as a menace.
An Israeli
official, speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, said after the Sde Boker
talks: “All countries here except the US have reservations about a nuclear deal
with Iran and what happened is that we got them closer to our approach.”
Blinken on
Sunday stressed that Israel and the US “see eye-to-eye” on the core issue of
stopping Iran from ever getting a nuclear bomb, despite their differences on
the
JCPOA.
‘No substitute’
The UAE and Bahrain formed ties with Israel under the
Abraham Accords,
brokered by former US president Donald Trump. Morocco then re-established
relations with Israel under a separate Trump-brokered agreement.
Israeli leaders
have argued that the normalizations highlight a changed Middle East, where Arab
leaders are no longer compelled to isolate Israel so long as its conflict with
the Palestinians remains unsolved.
The Abraham
Accords infuriated the
Palestinians, who argued that they marked a betrayal of
a decades-old Arab League consensus.
A small group of
protesters outside the Negev venue sought to force the Palestinian issue into
the room, waiving placards that said “Haven’t you forgotten someone?”
Blinken has
voiced strong support for the Abraham Accords but cautioned that they cannot
replace Israeli-Palestinian peace-building.
“We have to be
clear that these regional peace agreements are not a substitute for progress
between Palestinians and Israelis,” said Blinken, who had Sunday met
Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Blinken has
insisted that
President Joe Biden’s administration is committed to repairing
Palestinian relations, which collapsed under Trump.
But the
Palestinian leader told Blinken Sunday that the West showed “double standards”
by taking a hard line against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while ignoring what
he called Israel’s “crimes” against his people.
As the diplomats
were wrapping up their Negev meeting, Abbas hosted His Majesty King Abdullah in
Ramallah, the Jordanian monarch’s first visit to the West Bank since 2017.
Jordan — the
only Arab country with full Israeli ties that was not at the Negev meeting —
has played a middleman role between Israel and the
Palestinian Authority.
He seemed to
echo Blinken’s warning about the limits of normalization in his meeting with
Abbas, saying according to the official Palestinian news agency Wafa that “the
region cannot enjoy security and stability without a just and comprehensive
solution to the Palestinian issue”.
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