OCCUPIED JERUSALEM — Diplomats from the
US, Israel, and four Arab
countries will convene in Bahrain Monday, Israeli officials said, three months
after they vowed to boost cooperation at a landmark meeting in Israel.
اضافة اعلان
The talks in the
Bahraini capital Manama will bring together foreign ministry officials from the
UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco — which all normalized ties with Israel in 2020 — and
from Egypt, which made peace with Israel in 1979.
In March, they
met for the first time on Israeli soil in the
Sde Boker kibbutz in the Negev
desert, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken joining his counterparts.
The UAE and
Bahrain forged ties with Israel under the
Abraham Accords, brokered by former
US president Donald Trump. Morocco then reestablished relations with Israel
under a separate Trump-brokered agreement.
The Abraham
Accords infuriated the Palestinians, who argued that they marked a betrayal of
a decades-old Arab consensus to isolate Israel until it agrees to the
establishment of a Palestinian state, with its capital in East Jerusalem.
Washington has
said it wanted the meeting to be annual and to include the
Palestinian Authority and Jordan — another Arab nation that recognizes Israel, but which
has seen rising criticism over the status of Jerusalem.
Blinken has
voiced strong support for the Abraham Accords but cautioned at the Negev
meeting that they cannot replace Palestinian-Israeli peace-building.
The meetings aim
to deepen cooperation on areas including water, tourism, health, energy, food
security, and on regional security.
Israel has also
found common cause with
Gulf Arab states in their tense relationship with Iran.
Monday’s “meeting
will also serve as a milestone ahead of the US president’s expected visit to
the Middle East”, the Israeli foreign ministry said in a statement.
President Joe
Biden will travel to Israel, the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and Saudi Arabia
from July 13 to 16 — his first trip to the Middle East since taking office.
Once there, he
will attend a Gulf Cooperation Council summit with leaders from Saudi Arabia,
the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman, joined by the leaders of Egypt,
Iraq, and Jordan, a US official said.
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