At first, the desert quiet silenced the differences of opinion that had been voiced only a few hours earlier in Jerusalem. One after another, Arab foreign ministers landed at the Nevatim Airbase. None of them had any idea the horrors that would unfold later that evening when they would learn about the deadly terrorist shooting in Hadera.
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Bahraini Foreign Minister Abdullatif al-Zayani, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, Emirati Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed, and Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita arrived, and the limousines making their way across the white desert gave the pack of photographers that had made their way south to Sde Boker something to snap.
The sight of four high-ranking Arab officials attending a diplomatic summit in Israel, on the kibbutz of the founder of the state, is one we have never seen. Only a generation ago, the states they represent wanted to see Israel annihilated. And now, the Jewish state's meteoric success is causing them to want closer ties with it. Now Foreign Minister Yair Lapid intends to gather all the players in the heart of the desert to unify the bilateral cooperation in order to create a coordinated bloc that will operate together, and openly.
The decision to hold the summit at a desert oasis, far from urban centers, might press participants to make moves they otherwise wouldn't. All six foreign ministers enjoyed a private supper together, without anyone else. Arab-Israeli singer Valery Hamati, sang in three languages. The ministers were lucky they didn't have to go out into the freezing cold outside the hotel.
A diplomatic official said that the purpose of the Negev Summit was to build "regional security architecture" for Israel, Egypt, Morocco, the Emirates, and Bahrain. He said that Israel did not want to call the cooperation on security issues a "regional alliance," which is a loaded term in the Arab world. The official said the idea was to take the existing security cooperation between Israel and each of these countries and form a bloc. "A regional security architecture will operate in the air, on land, and at sea, and will also provide a response to pirate threats," the official said.
But very quickly, the reality the summit participants were trying to avoid made itself known. Reports about the Hadera attack caught US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on his way to Sde Boker from Ramallah.
Blinken was the only participant in the summit who stopped in on Palestinian Authority President and Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas on his way to the meeting. The elderly Palestinian leader wasn't important enough for the Arab foreign ministers, but he made the cut for the Jewish American official.
As if that weren't enough, a few hours before the attack, America's No. 1 diplomat said, with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett standing beside him, that they had discussed ways of ensuring that Passover, Ramadan and Easter [which overlap this year] passes quietly in Israel, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, especially in Jerusalem. Blinken said that steps must be taken to prevent actions by all sides that could increase tensions, including settlement expansion, settler violence, incitement to violence, home demolitions, payments to people convicted of terrorism, and evictions of families. In other words, from Blinken's perspective, nearly all the responsibility for terrorism falls on Israel and its citizens living in Judea and Samaria. These remarks for inciting and disgraceful even before the attack, and certainly in light of it. Bennett, by the way, made a mistake by not responding on the spot.
Updates reached the meeting rooms at the hotel, of course. The gap between the vision being discussed there and the serious and immediate threat to the citizens of Israel seemed as big as the distance between Sde Boker and Washington.
Last week, four Jews were murdered in a terrorist attack in Beersheba. Residents of the Negev suffer from criminal as well as ethno-religious violence. What good does it do to discuss a war on piracy in the Red Sea if people driving to Nevatim could be targeted by rock throwers?
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