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Much of his comments on Middle East peace came in a question-and-answer session, but his prepared remarks focused on the president’s “maximum pressure” campaign on the Iranian government.“For the previous eight years, we had an administration that had more respect for the leaders of Iran than it did for the State of Israel,” Pompeo said. He said that the administration was introducing a new condition in Geneva-based talks on the settlement of Syria’s seven-year-old civil war: The removal of all Iranian and Iranian-backed forces from Syria.“The onus of expelling Iran from Syria is on the Syrian regime,” Pompeo said. Without this condition met, he continued, “it will not receive one single dollar from the United States for reconstruction.”Pompeo listed, among the administration’s accomplishments, its fight against “antisemitism” at the UN, including at the Human Rights Council.The secretary also said he had spoken with Netanyahu earlier in the today, although he did not specify the topic.In the audience was Israel’s ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, who sat at the same dinner table as Yousef Al Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates’ envoy to the US. The two are said to have a strong personal relationship despite their nations maintaining no formal ties.