Secretary General of the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) Executive Committee, Saeb Erekat, described Sunday’s Arab Summit in Dhahran as a “Palestinian summit”.
The Palestinian foreign ministry said the Arab leaders’ meeting has achieved remarkable success in terms of Palestinian rights.
Erekat said that the summit was “purely Palestinian”, praising the condemnation by all Arab leaders of the US president’s recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The Arab “position confirmed the Palestinian right to have Jerusalem as the capital of the state of Palestine,” he added.
The PLO official welcomed the adoption by Arab leaders of all Palestinian proposals, mainly the peaceful political vision presented by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas before the United Nations Security Council in February, which is based on the 2002 Arab peace initiative.
Palestinian officials had extensive contacts with Arab countries before the summit, to push for the adoption of Abbas’ peace plan, which presented details for the negotiation process, mechanism and references, namely, the Arab peace initiative.
The Palestinian president called for convening an international peace conference in mid-2018, to form an international multilateral mechanism that will help Palestinians and Israelis resolve outstanding issues, including the status of Jerusalem, based on the Oslo Agreement.
Abbas proposed that during the negotiations, all unilateral actions be stopped, including Israeli settlement expansion. He also demanded the freeze of the decision recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and stopping the relocation of the US embassy to the city.
“The Arab summit has achieved remarkable success with regards to the Palestinian issue,” the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
It stressed that dubbing the Arab Summit as the “Jerusalem Summit” has reaffirmed “the centrality of the issue of Jerusalem at this particular stage.”
“It also means a clear Arab response to Israeli-American attempts to erase the issue of Jerusalem, pull it off the table or Judaize it,” the ministry added.
