Sharm Summit Mulls Sending Arab Leader To US Congress

Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki said Friday that Arab diplomats had endorsed a bid by the Palestinian government to send an Arab leader to speak about the Arab-Israeli peace process before the U.S. Congress.



"The Arab League leadership has adopted a Palestinian proposal to send an Arab leader to speak before the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament," al-Maliki, who is currently attending an Arab foreign ministers' meeting in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh, told The Anadolu Agency.



The leader, al-Maliki asserted, would "present the official Arab stance" on the peace process, based on the 2002 Saudi-proposed Arab Peace Initiative, which calls for normalizing Arab-Israeli relations in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from East Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied West Bank.



Al-Maliki compared the proposed move to that taken by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who made a controversial speech before the U.S. Congress earlier this month.



Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh will host the 26th annual Arab League Summit on Saturday and Sunday.



Egypt and Jordan are the only Arab countries to have signed peace agreements with Israel since the latter country's establishment in 1948.



The roots of the Palestine-Israel conflict date back to 1917, when the British government, in the now-famous "Balfour Declaration," called for the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.



In 1948, with the expiry of a League of Nations "mandate" awarded earlier to Great Britain, a new state – Israel – was declared inside historical Palestine.



As a result, some 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes, or were forcibly expelled, while hundreds of Palestinian villages and cities were razed to the ground by invading Jewish forces.



Israel went on to occupy East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the holy city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the self-proclaimed Jewish state – a move never recognized by the international community.



The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority wants an independent state in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as its capital.



www.aa.com.tr/en - Kahire