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Bahrain’s Foreign Minister called for new Israeli-Palestinian peace talks during a historic meeting in Israel on Wednesday with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Pompeo, President Donald Trump’s top diplomat, on a farewell visit to his close ally Israel, did not address Israel’s dispute with the Palestinians, who have protested his planned trip Thursday to a Jewish-owned company in the occupied West Bank. .
Bahrain’s Abdellatif al-Zayani said the landmark US-brokered agreements that the Gulf kingdom and the United Arab Emirates had reached to normalize ties with Israel would help foster a dawn of “peace for the entire Middle East.”
“To achieve and consolidate such a peace, the Palestinian and Israeli conflict must be resolved,” the minister said as Pompeo and Netanyahu stood aside at a joint press conference.
“Therefore, I call on both sides to come to the negotiating table to achieve a viable two-state solution,” Bahrain’s prime minister said on an official visit to Jerusalem, where both sides agreed to establish embassies in the countries of The other part.
Pompeo has no scheduled meetings with Palestinian leaders, who have vigorously rejected Trump’s stance on the conflict, including Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.
Instead, Pompeo stressed the need to work together to isolate common enemy Iran, which the US Treasury targeted with new sanctions on the same day.
Iran is “increasingly isolated and this will be forever until they change direction,” Pompeo said.
The United States and Israel, along with the Gulf states, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and, in particular, Saudi Arabia, share a strong animosity towards the regional Shiite Muslim power Iran.
They accuse the Islamic republic of attempting to build a nuclear bomb, fueling unrest from Syria and Iraq to Lebanon and Yemen, and seeking the destruction of Israel.
The outgoing Trump administration has made the isolation of Iran a centerpiece of its regional policy.
Pompeo warned the Islamic republic that the agreements that the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have reached with Israel show that “their influence in the region is waning.”
The New York Times reported Monday that Trump had asked his top aides last week about the possibility of attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Senior officials reportedly “dissuaded the president from going ahead with a military attack,” warning him that such an attack could escalate into a broader conflict in the twilight of his presidency.
Israel said on Wednesday it had hit Iranian targets in Syria with airstrikes overnight, in the latest of many strikes in the war-torn country.
A statement from the Israeli army said its fighter jets had “hit military targets” belonging to the Syrian armed forces and the Iranian Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Britain-based monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 10 people were killed, including foreign fighters and Syrian soldiers.
Israel said it launched the strikes in response to the discovery of improvised explosive devices near a military base on its side of the armistice line in the occupied Golan Heights.
Netanyahu said that Israel “will not tolerate any attempt to attack us from Syrian territory” and reiterated the Israeli policy of “not allowing the Iranian military entrenchment against us in Syria.”
Pompeo, who has so far backed Trump by refusing to concede defeat to President-elect Joe Biden, is on a tour of Europe and the Middle East that has so far taken him to France, Turkey and Georgia.
On Thursday, he is expected to become the first top US diplomat to visit a Jewish industrial zone in the occupied West Bank, where a vineyard has named one of its wines after him.
The Palestinians have angrily denounced the planned visit to the Psagot winery near Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority.
Dozens of Palestinians demonstrated in Al-Bireh, a community located between Jerusalem and Ramallah, and some threw stones at soldiers guarding the entrance to the settlers’ industrial zone.
Israeli settlement planning and construction in the Palestinian territories has boomed under successive Netanyahu administrations and especially since Trump took office in 2017.
Pompeo said a year ago that the United States no longer considers Israeli settlements in the West Bank to be contrary to international law.
Those comments were hailed by the Psagot Vineyard, which has been struggling to keep the “Israel” label on its bottles, rather than the phrase “Israeli settlements” required by various European court rulings.
Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammed Shtayyeh said Pompeo “is going to visit the … Jewish settlement simply because he is visiting a winery that has produced a bottle of wine named after him.”
“If international relations are designed in a bottle of wine, it’s to hell with international relations.”
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