In March last year, four Arab foreign ministers flew to the Negev Desert in Israel at the invitation of then Israeli foreign minister Yair Lapid. 

The meeting, known as the Negev Summit, was attended by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and by the four foreign ministers of the Arab countries that had either signed a peace treaty with Israel, Egypt in this case, or had joined the so-called Abraham Accords signed between Bahrain, the UAE, and Morocco and Israel in 2020 that normalise their relations.

Neither Jordan, the second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel after Egypt, nor the Palestinian Authority was present at the Negev meeting. The participants agreed to hold regular meetings on a yearly basis. The second one is scheduled to take place in March in Morocco.

In the months separating the first from the second such summit meeting, peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis has still not appeared on the horizon, either near or far, and Israel has elected what is considered to be the most extreme right wing government in its history headed by returnee from the political wilderness Benjamin Netanyahu, who is also being pursued by the Israeli judicial system. 

It is not surprising that the coalition agreements that Netanyahu has reached with the political parties represented in his cabinet include commitments, however vague for some observers, to annex West Bank territory to Israel, to legalise dozens of unauthorised settlements, and to appropriate large funds for road building and public transport in the West Bank.

What is even more alarming is the position adopted by the new Israeli government, which is insisting on a historical fallacy that wrongly believes that the Jewish people “have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the land of Israel,” including, from the point of view of the Israeli colonisers, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

Please note the use of the word “exclusive,” which simply negates the national rights of the Palestinian people in their own land of the Occupied West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem, as well as the rejection of Syrian sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

This position was clearly reflected in the reaction of the prime minister of Israel a week ago after the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution entitled “Israeli practices and settlement activities affecting the rights of the Palestinian people and other Arabs of Occupied Territories” on 30 December. Netanyahu said that the government of Israel under his leadership “will not be bound by this despicable resolution of the United Nations. The Jewish nation is not an occupier in its own land and its eternal capital Jerusalem. No UN decision can distort the historical facts.”

The UN General Assembly Resolution, Number 77/400, refers the question of Palestine and the legality or illegality of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land to the International Court of Justice.

Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Kohen said on 2 January that the resolution would kill any chance for peace with the Palestinians. You may wonder what chance for peace he is talking about when his own boss, Netanyahu, has unabashedly declared that Israel “is not an occupier in its own land and its own eternal capital Jerusalem” and that no decision by the UN “can distort the historical facts”.

You might also wonder, and rightly so, what the benefits of a second summit meeting in Morocco from an Arab point of view could be, given the existence of an extremist Israeli government that simply says that neither the Palestinians nor the Syrians have sovereignty over their own territories that were occupied by force of arms in June 1967.

* The writer is former assistant foreign minister.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 12 January, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly