AMMAN: Seven Arab foreign ministers and the Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa are to meet in Amman today to discuss the future Arab strategy for peace negotiations with Israel, officials said yesterday.
The meeting has added significance as it falls just ahead of a planned trip to Washington by Jordan’s King Abdallah, who is expected to relay the Arab vision on the peace process with Israel to the US President Barack Obama.
The foreign ministers of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and Syria will be among those meeting in the Jordanian capital, according to reliable sources in Amman.
The regular Arab summit conference, which last convened in Doha at the end of March, will attempt to muster support for the Arab peace initiative in the wake of the arrival of the extreme right-wing coalition government in Israel led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu ran on a platform of not recognizing the two-state solution endorsed by the US government, but offering “economic peace” to the Palestinians. The Arab blueprint offers to extend recognition to Israel by all Arab states if it quits all territories occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War, including East Jerusalem. No date has been so far declared for the monarch’s Washington trip.
Meanwhile, Egyptian mediators trying to break the deadlock in talks on a Palestinian government of national unity have told rival groups Fatah and Hamas to cooperate on reconstructing Gaza as a first step, officials said in Cairo.
Palestinian groups have been talking in Cairo for months but have so far failed to agree on a unity government ahead of elections set for January 2010.
The proposal to cooperate on Gaza was an attempt to break the impasse, an official said. “It became clear that a deal between the two sides was near impossible,” a senior Palestinian official involved in the talks told Reuters.
The aim of the talks is to ending almost two years of enmity between the groups, who fought a brief civil war that culminated in Hamas’ seizure of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Egypt’s new plan is for a Fatah-Hamas committee answerable to the West Bank-based government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Western-backed Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to oversee reconstruction work, while the Hamas administration in Gaza provides the headquarters and logistics.
Fatah welcomed the proposal as an introduction to a solution but Hamas said it would give legitimacy to Fayyad’s government, which the Islamist group has never accepted. Senior Fatah official Nabil Shaath, an Abbas aide, said the Egyptian leadership gave Abbas a written proposal during his visit to Cairo this week and that he was expected to respond before a new round of talks is set to start on April 26.
“Both factions must provide Egypt with answers when they return for a new session of talks,” said the official, who asked not to be named. Talks have failed so far because of disagreement over the political agenda for the proposed unity government and the way it will handle the conflict with Israel.
