On Tuesday, Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki through a news conference in the occupied West Bank city of Ramallah said that Palestine has quit its current chairmanship of Arab League meetings, stating the reason to be the growing dishonourable Arab ties with Israel.
“Palestine has decided to concede its right to chair the League’s council [of foreign ministers] at its current session. There is no honour in seeing Arabs rush towards normalisation during its presidency,” Maliki stated.
Palestinian leaders had recently failed to convince the Arab League to condemn the United Arab Emirates (UAE) – Israel deal of normalizing ties.
Riyad, Palestinian Foreign Minister, had urged the Arab nations to reject the UAE-Israel deal and said that if Arab league did not condemn the deal, the Arab League would be “complicit with the normalisation.”
Palestinians see UAE and Bahrain’s ‘normalisation’ deal with Israel, orchestrated by US President Donald Trump, as a betrayal that would most probably weaken a long-standing pan-Arab position that urges Israel to withdraw from occupied Palestinian territory.
Palestine intended to chair Arab League meetings for the next six months, however, Foreign Minister Riyad informed Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit that Palestine no longer wanted the position.
After years of in-fighting, rival Palestinian groups have decided to form a united front over UAE and Bahrain’s ties with Israel. Hamas, a Palestinian Sunni-Islamic fundamentalist militant organization, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s secular section of the Palestine Liberation Organization joined hands against the recent growing Arab- Israel ties.
Hamas and the Palestine Liberation Organization leadership were due to hold reconciliation talks in Turkey on Tuesday.
Arab countries have long backed the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative and the two-state solution. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative calls for Israel to fully withdraw from illegally occupied Palestinian land in exchange for establishing ties with Arab countries.
However, over the past few years, ties between Gulf Arab countries and Israel have increased. The main reason behind this is claimed to be Israel and Sunni majority Arab country’s shared enmity of Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah.
Palestine struggles for an independent state based on the de facto borders before the 1967 war with Israel, in which Israel took control of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem.