From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, December 20, 2022
US planning to reconvene Israeli-Arab ‘Negev Summit’ early next year
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The United States is planning a meeting early in 2023 between Israel and Arab nations that recognize it, as the Americans push the incoming right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu to show restraint, says a US official.
A senior US official says the US is planning a meeting “probably in the first quarter” of 2023 of foreign ministers from the so-called Negev summit in March. The location of the next summit is not immediately clear.
The meeting brought to the Israeli desert the foreign minister of Egypt, the first Arab state to make peace with Israel, and his counterparts from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which normalized relations in 2020 in the so-called Abraham Accords.
The US official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that the Abraham Accords are “near and dear to the heart of Prime Minister [designate] Netanyahu and so I imagine that he wants to continue to see that move forward… I think Israel has to factor that in.”
Speaking at the J Street confab earlier this month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken hailed the Negev Summit, and added that “early next year, working groups will meet to expand collaboration on key issues in the areas that we’ve set out for cooperation under Negev, including health, food security, tourism, regional security.”
In October, The Times of Israel reported that foreign ministers would be reconvening in January, but the meeting was pushed back.
The Times of Israel Community.