Blinken joins rare Israel-Arab summit

SDE BOKER, Israel－United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the top diplomats of Israel and four Arab states held talks on Monday to discuss issues from the Iran nuclear negotiations to the global shockwaves of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The talks brought together for the first time on Israeli soil the foreign ministers of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco－which all normalized ties with the Jewish state in 2020－and Egypt.

Its late Sunday opening, in the Sde Boker kibbutz deep in the Negev desert, was marred by a shooting in northern Israel that killed two police officers. The Islamic State group, which has rarely managed to stage attacks inside Israel, claimed responsibility for the attack.

And early on Monday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's office confirmed he had caught COVID-19, a day after he held closed-door meetings with Blinken, followed by a joint news conference without masks.

The State Department said Blinken, who was out jogging in Negev early on Monday, was the only member of the US delegation considered a "close contact" of Bennett's and that he would follow public health guidelines "including by masking and undergoing appropriate testing".

The Negev meeting takes place as the US and European allies have expressed quiet frustration that Middle East countries generally have not combined efforts to back Ukraine in the conflict and not distancing themselves from Moscow.

But Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas rebuffed any pressure to criticize Russia, instead castigating the West for "double standards" that he said penalized Moscow while ignoring Israel's "crimes" against the Palestinians.

"The current events in Europe have shown blatant double standards," he told Blinken on Sunday.

"Despite the crimes of the Israeli occupation that amounted to ethnic cleansing and racial discrimination… we find no one who is holding Israel responsible for behaving as a state above the law."

The talks on restoring the 2015 Iran nuclear deal were high on the agenda in meetings that Blinken held on Sunday with Bennett, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and President Isaac Herzog.

Speaking alongside Lapid, Blinken said the US believes restoring the agreement is "the best way to put Iran's (nuclear) program back in the box" after the US withdrew from the deal under former president Donald Trump in 2018.

Blinken stressed that "when it comes to the most important element, we see eye-to-eye" with Israel.

Lapid said the two sides "have disagreements" about the deal, in which the restoration is in the final stages of negotiation in Vienna after almost a year of on-off talks.

Also on Sunday, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, slammed the meeting between the Arab countries' foreign ministers with Blinken.

Hazem Qassem, Hamas spokesman in Gaza, told reporters that "Hamas rejects all forms of normalization with Israel", adding that such meetings "serve nothing but perpetuate the continuous aggression against the Palestinians and their land".

Qassem called on Arab countries that signed normalization agreements with Israel to reconsider them in line with the interests of their people, and to keep with their historical responsibilities in protecting Jerusalem and Palestine.

Agencies - Xinhua