BICOM

The Foreign ministers of Jordan, Egypt, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia met on Wednesday at the Dead Sea in Jordan to coordinate positions on Israeli-Palestinian issues, Syria, Iran and Qatar.

The Jordan Times reported that Jordan’s king Abdullah emphasised the need to bring an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the two-state solution and the Arab Peace Initiative, with a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders and a capital in East Jerusalem.

Jordan’s foreign minister described the closed-door meetings as a “consultation between brothers and friends”. Bader al-Madi, a political scientist at the University of Jordan, noted the meeting’s unexpectedly short duration. He said: “Either the attendees reached some kind of agreement before the meeting, or they had some kind of disagreement during it.”

Discussions on Syria included the possibility of readmitting the Syrian regime into the Arab League. Several Arab states, including Lebanon and Tunisia, have called for Syria’s return, and the UAE has reopened its embassy in Damascus. A senior Gulf official told The National, a newspaper in the UAE, that Syria is unlikely to be readmitted to the Arab League soon. He said: “I don’t expect it to happen because we need consensus in the Arab League and I don’t see it this soon”. The official also said: “We don’t really want confrontation with Iran but we want enough pressure for Iran to examine its destabilising behaviour.”

On 14 February, the US and Poland will jointly host a special conference on the Middle East. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that the conference will look at “making sure Iran is not a destabilising influence”.