Mubarak Meets Israel’s Foreign Minister
Ms. Livni’s meetings in Egypt represented the first high-level talks between officials from Arab capitals and Israel since the Arab League reaffirmed its support in March for the initiative, which it first approved in 2002.
The proposal calls for full recognition and normalized relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders, and for the creation of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. The proposal also calls for “an agreed, just solution” to the issue of Palestinian refugees.
Ms. Livni also spoke to President Mubarak about the security situation in the Gaza Strip and about “the problems of growing Hamas military capabilities and the continual firing of Kassam rockets into Israel,” according to a statement issued by the Israeli Foreign Ministry Bureau.
After meeting with President Mubarak, Ms. Livni had additional talks in Cairo with the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and with the Jordanian foreign minister, Abdul-Ilah al-Khatib.
Egypt and Jordan are the only to Arab countries that have signed peace treaties with Israel. They have served as an official diplomatic bridge between Israel and other Arab capitals. As events in the Middle East have become more turbulent, there have also been some back-channel talks between Israel and some Arab nations, notably Saudi Arabia.
This latest set of talks was greeted in Cairo as a step forward in a process that had appeared to some regional analysts to have been bogged down by the political crisis in Israel. Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, has barely hung onto his job after being excoriated by a committee that reviewed Israel’s prosecution of the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer.
“There is a problem now,” said Emad Gad, editor of Israeli Digest, a magazine published by Egypt’s premier research center in Cairo, the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “The initiative is presented to the Israelis, and the initiative has very clear words — and it doesn’t even demand the right of return, but refers to resolving the issue of the refugees, so there is room to talk. But you have an Israeli government that is in a very precarious position.”
The new impetus behind the Arab League plan reflects a sense among Arab officials in Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia that the most important thing they can do to help stabilize the increasingly volatile region — and to counter the growing support for radical Islamist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas — is to pursue a settlement to the Palestinian-Israel crisis.
When it was first put forward in 2002, Israel rejected the Arab initiative. But more recently it has yielded to pressure from Washington to discuss the plan.
For its part, Washington has yielded to pressure from Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia to try to jump-start the stalled peace efforts. There has been little public expressions of optimism over the outcome of the latest effort, though officials have said they are committed to keeping the process moving.
“It’s not a big step,” Adnan Abu-Odeh, a former adviser to King Hussein of Jordan, said of the talks in Cairo. “It’s a good step. It is one step forward, but not enough to make me believe that this is a prelude to a peaceful settlement, because the other side has not and will not respond the way we want or expect it to respond. And let’s wait and see.”