League chief: 20-year peace effort a waste

Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi, flanked by Egypt’s Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamal Amr (right) and Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Malki, speaks during a press conference in Ramallah yesterday.Agencies/RamallahThe past 20 years of the Middle East peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has been a “waste of time”, Arab League chief Nabil al-Arabi said yesterday in Ramallah. His visit, with Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr, came the day after Israel’s former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman demanded the resignation of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas before any talks could resume. Speaking to reporters following a meeting with Abbas in Ramallah, Arabi called for a new approach to the peace process, since Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have so far produced no results. “Our next move in agreement with the Palestinians and with full support from the Arab countries and the European Union is to change the current formula (for the peace process),” he said. “We cannot continue with the methods of the last 20 years. It was a waste of time,” he said. Arabi said the Middle East conflict should be taken back to the UN Security Council after consulting with all parties, including the US, “to discuss and agree on a new approach to this issue with a goal to end the conflict and not just to manage it”. Arabi said that in the four-hour meeting with Abbas they discussed the Arab League’s promise to provide an economic “safety net” of $100mn a month to alleviate Israeli sanctions imposed after last month’s historic UN vote to raise the Palestinians’ diplomatic standing. “We discussed the financial and political support for the Palestinian Authority and the Arab safety net under which $100mn had to be provided monthly, but were not delivered,” he said. He said the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority was undergoing a “crippling” financial crisis and that he and the Palestinian leader had agreed ways to tackle the problem, but he did not elaborate. Other Arab foreign ministers are due to visit Ramallah “in the coming days and weeks”, Arabi said. The Egyptian foreign minister invited Abbas to visit Egypt in the coming days in order to relaunch reconciliation talks between Abbas’ Fatah party and its rival, the Islamist Hamas movement. The talks have hit a stalemate in recent weeks. The Arab officials later met Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad who showed them from a hilltop in Ramallah a large area of the West Bank, referred to as Area C, which Israel controls and prevents the Palestinians from developing.