French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said on Sunday that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has spoken positively of the French Mideast peace initiative, and that France would be willing to reschedule the meeting of foreign ministers, now scheduled for May 30, so that Kerry could attend. He noted that the meeting was postponed for a couple of days.
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The foreign ministers’ meeting will occur without the participation of Israeli and Palestinian representatives, ahead of the main worldwide peace conference that France hopes to hold in Paris over the summer.
In a rare direct appeal to Palestinians and Israelis, Sissi had urged the two peoples to draw hope from the “real and stable peace” between Israel and Egypt.
French President Francois Hollande announced Tuesday that the meeting of representatives of 20 countries that had been scheduled for May 30 would be postponed since U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry can not attend. Israel Public Radio reported that the meeting will be held on summer. France has been on a diplomatic frenzy to relaunch peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis and proposed to host an global conference at the end of this month.
France is rightly describing its peace move as a first step towards defusing the “powder-keg” threatening to explode in the Middle-East with Israel persisting with its repressive and expansionist policies.
The Egyptian president says the Israelis and Palestinians need look no farther than the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty to see the positive outcome of peacemaking.
“Any other attempt just distances peace and gives Palestinians a means of evading dealing with the root of the conflict, which is not recognising the State of Israel”, he said.
Abbas and the Palestinians have been calling on Israel to put an end to the expansion of settlement and to the construction of settlement in the Palestinian territories.
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Abbas told the Israeli side that the Palestinians support the French initiative for making peace in the Middle East “because we want the global community to bear its responsibility towards finding a fair solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”. “The French initiative on the peace process is necessary and urgent”. In his daily briefing for reporters, State Department spokesman John Kirby said no final decision has been made on Kerry’s attendance and that the Americans had informed the French that Kerry was not available on May 30.
