Diplomats from the United States, Israel and four Arab countries will meet in Bahrain on Monday, three months after a historic meeting on Israeli soil aimed at strengthening their cooperation, Israeli officials said Sunday.
Officials from the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which normalized relations with the Jewish state in 2020, and from Egypt, the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, will take part in the discussions to be held in the capital Manama.
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In March, the foreign ministers of these four countries held an unprecedented meeting in Sde Boker, a kibbutz in the Negev desert, in southern Israel, with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The Emirates and Bahrain were the first Gulf Arab countries to publicly normalize relations with Israel in September 2020, at the instigation of Donald Trump, then President of the United States.
Morocco then followed suit.
An annual meeting
These so-called Abraham Accords broke with decades of Arab consensus conditioning the establishment of relations with Israel on the resolution of the Palestinian question.
Washington says it hopes that the countries gathered in Sde Boker will meet annually, and that they will be joined by representatives of the Palestinian Authority and Jordan, linked to Israel by a peace treaty since 1994.
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These meetings aim to deepen cooperation in areas such as water, tourism, health and food security.
Israel also shares with several Gulf countries a fear vis-à-vis the nuclear program of Iran which, despite its denials, is suspected of seeking to acquire atomic weapons.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi for his part criticized on Sunday any rapprochement between Arab countries and Israel, a sworn enemy of the Islamic Republic.
"
The normalization of relations with the Zionist regime (...) will not solve any problem in the region but will aggravate
it," he warned.
At the meeting in March, Antony Blinken expressed his support for the "
Abraham Accords
", but warned that they could not replace an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Monday's meeting "
represents an important step ahead of US President Joe Biden's expected visit to the Middle East
," Israel's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
President Biden is due to visit Israel, the occupied West Bank and Saudi Arabia from July 13 to 16, where he will arrive on a first direct flight from the Jewish state to the Saudi kingdom.
This will be his first trip to the Middle East as President of the United States.
Joe Biden has also planned to participate in a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – a diplomatic forum bringing together several Arab countries in the region – in Saudi Arabia.
