Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Wednesday arrived in Cairo, where he is scheduled to meet with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Jordan’s King Abdullah to discuss ways to internationalize talks toward a two-state resolution.
The Abbas-Sisi-Abdullah summit, which is expected to take place on Thursday, will discuss common issues and ways of unifying the Palestinian-Egyptian-Jordanian position in order to follow up on the political activities at the international level and seek to revive the peace process with Israel, senior Palestinian official Azzam al-Ahmed said.
The renewed push to review the peace process comes as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has clarified that he has no intention of meeting with Abbas or engaging in peace talks.
Bennett’s spokesman Matan Sidi dismissed a report in the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat which said that Bennett has been disinvited from what would have been a quadrilateral meeting in Cairo.
“There was no intention to hold a meeting with the PA president and there is no expectation that any such meeting will be held,” Sidi said.
He clarified that Bennett is scheduled to go to Cairo to meet with Sisi, but that no date had been set for the meeting.
“President Sisi invited the prime minister to meet in Egypt, and the prime minister will meet with him soon,” Sidi said.
Abbas wants an internationalized peace process in which the US is not the main broker. Ahmed indicated that the PA leadership was seeking the backing of Egypt and Jordan for relaunching the peace process with Israel under the umbrella of the United Nations with the participation of the Quartet members – the US, UN, Russia, and the European Union.
Ahmed said that the timing of the tripartite summit was extremely important because it comes ahead of the planned Arab summit in Algeria and the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York.
Abbas is accompanied by PA Foreign Minister Riyad Malki, head of the General Authority of Civil Affairs Hussein al-Sheikh, and General Intelligence Service Chief Majed Faraj.
On the eve of his visit to Cairo, Abbas chaired a meeting of the PLO leadership in Ramallah to discuss the latest developments surrounding the Palestinian issue. He also briefed the members of the PLO Executive Committee, the highest decision-making body of the organization, on the outcome of his Sunday night meeting with Defense Minister Benny Gantz.
A PLO official said that the committee members expressed satisfaction with the results of the Gantz-Abbas meeting because of the “big achievements” for the Palestinians.
The official said that Abbas and Gantz discussed several issues related to Palestinian family reunification, the release of Palestinian security prisoners incarcerated before the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 between Israel and the PLO, and the controversy surrounding the deduction by Israel of hundreds of millions of shekels from tax revenues belonging to the PA because of payments made to the families of prisoners and “martyrs.”
“The president briefed the PLO Executive Committee on his meeting in Ramallah with Minister Benny Gantz, which focused on the need to adhere to international legitimacy and the two-state solution, despite our knowledge that the current Israeli government’s situation is not ripe for a serious peace process,” the committee said in a statement after the meeting.
It said that Abbas and Gantz agreed to work on solving a number of issues, such as the release of security prisoners and the recovery of the bodies of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks against Israelis.
The two also agreed to work on solving other issues related to “halting settlements and settler attacks, and respecting international legitimacy resolutions,” the statement read.
Referring to the upcoming tripartite summit, the PLO committee said that it aims “to unify the vision between them to deal with political, regional and international efforts to move the peace process in the Middle East in order to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian and Arab lands occupied since 1967.”
The committee condemned “the continuous Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, which claimed the lives of dozens of martyrs of our people, the continuation of settlement expansion and the demolition of citizens’ homes, as well as the threat to evict thousands of families” from their homes and farms in east Jerusalem and the West Bank.
“Our people will remain steadfast and persistent in their struggle and popular resistance until the occupation is defeated and the independent Palestinian state is established with East Jerusalem as its capital,” according to the committee, which expressed its total rejection of Bennett’s statements before and after his recent visit to the US.
“The Executive Committee also stressed that the Israeli side must understand that continuing the policy of settlement, killing, arrests, and attempting to change the character of Islamic and Christian religious places in Jerusalem and Hebron will not achieve its expansionist ambitions and will not bring security and stability,” the committee added. “The only way to security and peace for all is only by ending the Israeli occupation of the lands of the Occupied State of Palestine.
The US has been the main broker for past Israeli-Palestinian talks, the last round of which was in 2014. Biden, however, has not put forward a new peace initiative or attempted to revive past ones.
PA Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh on Tuesday also focused on the need for an internationalized Israeli-Palestinian peace process as he clarified that “Washington does not have a peace initiative at all.”
Shtayyeh spoke about the current stalemate in a Zoom talk he gave to the Nizami Ganjavi International Center.
The new Israeli government, he said, is accelerating its “colonization program and construction of settlements.”
It “has no political platform and no initiative to end the conflict with us. It seems to me that all it cares for is to maintain the status quo and all of us know that the status quo is unsustainable,” Shtayyeh said.
This “political vacuum … is very dangerous,” Shtayyeh warned.
“It needs to be filled with some initiative. The US does not have an initiative, Europe does not have an initiative, the Israelis have no idea how to end the conflict with us… and Arab countries are going in a totally different direction,” Shtayyeh said.
In Jerusalem, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid confirmed that at present direct peace talks with the Palestinians was not possible, partially because there was no elected leadership in Ramallah.
It’s been presumed that the Bennett-Lapid government composed of parties from the Left-to-the-Right, is not equipped to tackle the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
“This is a government that will concentrate on domestic issues,” Lapid told foreign journalists. He told reporters that he supports a two-state resolution to the conflict but would not commit to renew talks when he replaces Bennett as Prime Minister in two years.