From the Liveblog of
Monday, January 22, 2024
Katz skirts EU talk of two-state solution with unrelated video presentation, irking participants
Israel’s foreign minister sidestepped discussion of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at a meeting with European Union counterparts, opting to show them aspirational videos of future infrastructure projects.
The minister, Israel Katz, was in Brussels for discussions on the Middle East, focusing largely on the consequences of Palestinian militant group Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza.
EU ministers were keen to stress their calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, as part of a comprehensive long-term peace settlement. But the Israeli government has pushed back against such calls.
At the meeting, Katz showed the ministers videos of an envisioned artificial island off the coast of Gaza and a rail network linking the Middle East to India, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and other EU diplomats say.
Borrell makes clear he was not impressed with the move.
“The minister showed us a couple of videos which had little or nothing to do with the issues we were discussing,” Borrell tells reporters, adding that he thought Katz could have made better use of his time with his EU colleagues.
Diplomats say the videos were part of ideas presented by Katz in a previous role and surprised others in the room.
The EU ministers also met separately with their counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, as well as with Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki, as they discussed both the current crisis in Gaza and the broader Middle East.
