Pence meets Sisi on Mideast tour amid Arab anger
US VICE President Mike Pence held talks with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Saturday at the start of a delayed Middle East tour overshadowed by Arab anger over Washington’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Controversy over President Donald Trump’s decision to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem had led to the cancellation of a number of planned meetings ahead of the trip originally scheduled for December.
The Palestinian leadership, already furious over the Jerusalem decision, has denounced the US administration and had already refused to meet Pence in December.
A coalition of Arab parties in the Israeli parliament said on Saturday it would boycott a speech by Pence today , calling him “dangerous and messianic”.
Pence held talks with ex-army chief Sisi in Cairo that were expected to focus on US aid and security, including a jihadist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula. Sisi’s office said the talks also covered Jerusalem, with the president stressing Egypt’s support for a two-state peace settlement and “the right of the Palestinian people to establish an independent state with east Jerusalem as capital”.
Pence, for his part, said relations between Cairo and Washington had “never been stronger” thanks to the leadership of Trump and Sisi.
The vice president later travelled on to Amman ahead of a one-on-one meeting with King Abdullah II yesterday before heading to Israel.
Key security partners
The leaders of both Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab states that have peace treaties with Israel, would be key players if US mediators ever manage to get a revived Israeli-Palestinian peace process off the ground, as Trump says he wants. They are also key intelligence-sharing and security partners in America’s covert and overt battles against Islamist extremism in the region, and Egypt is a major recipient of aid to help it buy advanced US military hardware.
Sisi, one of Trump’s closest allies in the region, had urged the US president before his Jerusalem declaration “not to complicate the situation in the region by taking measures that jeopardise the chances of peace in the Middle East”.
After Jordan – the custodian of Mus- lim holy sites in Jerusalem – Pence will head to Israel for talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today.
Pence can expect a warm welcome after Trump’s decision on Jerusalem, which Israelis and Palestinians alike interpreted asWashington taking Israel’s side in the dispute over the city.
Israel occupied theWest Bank in 1967 and later annexed east Jerusalem in a move never recognised by the international community. Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its united capital, while the Palestinians see the eastern sector as the capital of their future state.
The international community considers east Jerusalem illegally occupied by Israel and currently all countries have their embassies in the commercial capital Tel Aviv.
The State Department has begun to plan the sensitive move of the American Embassy to Jerusalem, a process that US diplomats say may take years to complete.
This week reports surfaced thatWashington may temporarily designate the US consulate general in Jerusalem as the embassy while the search for a secure and practical site for a long-term mission continues.
“That is a process that takes, anywhere in the world, time. Time for appropriate design, time for execution. It is a matter of years and not weeks or months,” he said.