Riyadh reassures it will not abandon Jerusalem, refugees
Freed Palestinian teen vows to continue resistance • Bibi defends Jewish nation law
RIYADH/JERUSALEM: Saudi Arabia has reassured Arab allies it will not endorse any Middle East peace plan that fails to address Jerusalem’s status or refugees’ right of return, easing their concerns that the kingdom might back a nascent US deal which aligns with Israel on key issues. King Salman’s private guarantees to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his public defense of long-standing Arab positions in recent months have helped reverse perceptions that Saudi Arabia’s stance was changing, diplomats and analysts said.
This in turn has called into question whether Saudi Arabia, birthplace of Islam and site of its holiest shrines, can rally Arab support for a new push to end the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, with an eye to closing ranks against mutual enemy Iran. “In Saudi Arabia, the king is the one who decides on this issue,” said a senior Arab diplomat in Riyadh. “The US mistake was they thought one country could pressure the rest to give in, but it’s not about pressure. No Arab leader can concede on Jerusalem or Palestine.”
Palestinian ambassador to Riyadh Basem Al-Agha told Reuters that King Salman had expressed support for Palestinians in a recent meeting with Abbas, saying: “We will not abandon you ... We accept what you accept and we reject what you reject.” He said that King Salman naming the 2018 Arab League conference “The Jerusalem Summit” and announcing $200 million in aid for Palestinians were messages that Jerusalem and refugees were back on the table. The Saudi authorities did not respond to a request for comment on the current status of diplomatic efforts.
Diplomats in the region say Washington’s current thinking, conveyed during a tour last month by top White House officials, does not include Arab East Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, a right of return for refugees or a freeze of Israeli settlements in lands claimed by the Palestinians. Senior adviser Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has not provided concrete details of the US strategy more than 18 months after he was tasked with forging peace.
Kushner and fellow negotiator Jason Greenblatt have not presented a comprehensive proposal but rather disjointed elements, which one diplomat said “crossed too many red lines”. Instead, they heavily focused on the idea of setting up an economic zone in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula with the adjacent Gaza Strip possibly coming under the control of Cairo, which Arab diplomats described as unacceptable.
In Qatar, Kushner asked Amir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani to pressure the Islamist group Hamas to cede control of Gaza in return for development aid, the diplomats said. “The problem is there is no cohesive plan presented to all countries,” said the senior Arab diplomat in Riyadh. “Nobody sees what everyone else is being offered.” Kushner, a 37-year-old real estate developer with little experience of international diplomacy or political negotiation, visited Jordan, Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, Egypt and Israel in June. He did not meet Abbas, who has refused to see Trump’s team after the US embassy was moved to Jerusalem.
In an interview at the end of his trip, Kushner said Washington would announce its Middle East peace plan soon, and press on with or without Abbas. Yet there has been little to suggest any significant progress towards ending the decades-old conflict, which Trump has said would be “the ultimate deal”. “There is no new push. Nothing Kushner presented is acceptable to any of the Arab countries,” the Arab diplomat said. “He thinks he is ‘I Dream of Genie’ with a magic wand to make a new solution to the problem.”
Palestinian teen freed
Meanwhile, Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi left prison yesterday and was greeted by crowds of supporters after serving eight months for slapping Israeli soldiers, an episode that made her a symbol of resistance for Palestinians. Tamimi, 17, and her mother Nariman, who was also jailed over the incident, arrived in their village of Nabi Saleh in the occupied West Bank, where they were mobbed by journalists. Easily recognizable by her shock of reddish hair, Tamimi wore a Palestinian-style keffiyeh around her neck, at times appearing relaxed but at other moments overwhelmed as television cameras followed her.
“The resistance continues until the fall of the occupation, and of course the (female) prisoners in jail are all strong,” Ahed Tamimi said, her voice barely audible above the crowd. “I thank everyone who supported me in this sentence and supports all the prisoners.” Her father Bassem put his arms around Ahed and her mother as they walked together along a road, while a crowd of around 100 chanted “we want to live in freedom”.
At a press conference later at a square in the village, Tamimi sat at a table behind a forest of microphones, a translator providing an English version of her remarks. She declined to take questions from journalists from the Israeli media because of what she said was unfair coverage of her and her family’s cause. She said she planned to study law to hold Israel’s occupation accountable. “Of course I am very happy that I came back to my family, but that happiness is partial because of the prisoners who are still in prison,” she said.
Tamimi also visited the tomb of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Ramallah and laid flowers there, before meeting Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. Abbas described Tamimi as “a model of peaceful civil resistance
..., proving to the world that our Palestinian people will stand firm and constant on their land, no matter what the sacrifice”.
Israeli authorities appeared keen to avoid media coverage of the release as much as possible, and conflicting information had meant supporters and journalists scrambled to arrive on time at the correct location. Tamimi and her mother had been driven early yesterday from Israel’s Sharon prison into the West Bank, authorities said. But the location of the checkpoint where they were to cross into the territory was changed three times before it was finally announced they were being taken to a crossing at Rantis, about an hour’s drive from the initial location.
In a sign of the sensitivity of the case, Israeli authorities on Saturday arrested two Italians and a Palestinian for painting Tamimi’s image on the Israeli separation wall cutting off the West Bank. Both Tamimi and her mother were sentenced to eight months by an Israeli military court following a plea deal over the December incident, which the family said took place in their garden in Nabi Saleh. They were released some three weeks early, a common practice by Israeli authorities due to overcrowded prisons, Tamimi’s lawyer Gaby Lasky said.
Netanyahu backs law
Separately, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday defended a new law declaring Israel the Jewish people’s nation state, saying it did not harm minority rights despite it lacking references to equality and democracy. The new legislation speaks of Israel as the historic homeland of the Jews and says they have a “unique” right to self-determination there. Netanyahu said other laws are already on the books guaranteeing equality for non-Jews and defining Israel as democratic.
“However, we have never determined the national rights of the Jewish people in its land in a basic law - until now, when we passed the nation state law,” Netanyahu said at a weekly cabinet meeting. The law was passed in the middle of the night on July 19 and is part of Israel’s socalled basic laws, a de facto constitution. It has been subject to harsh criticism in parliament and elsewhere. Arab lawmaker Zouheir Bahloul of the opposition Zionist Union party resigned on Saturday over it.
Hundreds of Israeli writers and artists have signed a petition calling on Netanyahu to “stop your government and coalition members from scourging minorities” and repeal the law. Arab citizens make up some 17.5 percent of Israel’s more than eight million population. Members of Israel’s 130,000-strong Druze community - who serve in the police and military - have also been among those strongly denouncing the legislation. “There is nothing in this law that infringes on your rights as equal citizens of the state of Israel, and there is nothing in it that harms the special status of the Druze community in Israel,” Netanyahu said yesterday. — Agencies