A Mediterranean Union summit, originally planned to be held on November 21 in Barcelona, has been postponed due to the deadlock in the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, AFP reported on Monday.
The Spanish government said in a statement: “Given the evidence that the deadlocked peace process in the Middle East would make a satisfactory participation in the summit scheduled for November 21 impossible, the co-presidency and Spain have decided to postpone it.”
Direct peace negotiations between the two sides resumed in September, nine months after Israel's unilateral construction freeze in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, but the PA walked away from the talks once the construction freeze expired at the end of September.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is now waiting for written guarantees in order to begin discussing with his cabinet a new three-month freeze which was demanded during his meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last week. The U.S. has promised 20 jet fighters, as well as an automatic veto of any anti-Israel resolution or demand for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian state in the United Nations, but those will go into effect only after a peace agreement is reached and not because of the freeze, claims Likud minister Uzi Landau..
The Arab League has said that it will likely reject direct talks based on this freeze and is waiting to see if the Obama administration will offer it further inducements, such as compensation, guarantees on its desired borders and its demand that five million foreign Arabs can move to Israel, on the basis of claims that they or their parents and grandparents lived in the country.
As it is not yet clear whether a new freeze will lead to the resumption of peace negotiations, it remains unknown when the meeting of the Mediterranean Union will indeed be held. The summit was initially scheduled to take place on June 7 in Barcelona but was postponed to November after several Arab countries said they would boycott it over the presence of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
Egypt and France co-chair the Mediterranean Union, while Spain hosts the group's headquarters in Barcelona. The statement published by the Spanish governments said that the three nations “want this summit to be held in Barcelona in the coming months,” add added that they are calling for “an early resumption of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians on the basis of international law, the agreements signed between the parties and other terms of reference of the peace process.”
43 nations are members of the Mediterranean Union, which was launched in Paris in July 2008 by French President Nicolas Sarkozy. The union groups all 27 EU member states with countries in North Africa, the Balkans, the Arab world as well as Israel.