30 October 2006
Israeli's foreign minister Tzipi Livni has canceled a trip to the Gulf state Qatar. Livni's office said on Sunday that she had decided against attending this week's United Nations-sponsored democracy conference in the Arab country after learning that two Palestinian Authority lawmakers from Hamas would be there as well. The Israeli delegation was headed by Yaacov Hadas, deputy director general of the foreign ministry's Middle East department. Foreign Ministry spokesman Marc Regev explained that Livni's decision to stay away as due to differences with Hamas. "Israel rejects all contacts with Hamas for as long as it does not respect the three preconditions set by the international community: it must give up violence and recognize Israel and the agreements signed by the Palestinians." Israel and Qatar have maintained low-level ties for more than a decade. Had Livni attended the conference, she would have been the most senior Israeli official to come to Qatar since then-prime minister Shimon Peres opened a trade mission in Qatar in 1996. The news that the Israeli foreign minister planned to attend the Doha meeting prompted a boycott by Lebanon's foreign minister Fawzi Salukh, who announced on Saturday that he would not go to Doha because of Livni's presence. An Arab diplomat told AFP that several other Arab countries had downgraded their representation because they had expected Livni to attend.
Meanwhile, Israeli television reports that a group of Israeli negotiators has met secretly with representatives of the governing Palestinian Hamas movement in London earlier this month. The meeting was organized by an intermediary for the former British intelligence (MI6) officer Alistair Crook, the report said. The Israelis who took part in the talks described Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas's moderate Fatah party as a "has-been" and said it was necessary to engage in dialogue with Hamas. For their part, the Islamists of Hamas urged Israel to send amenable Israeli politicians, such as leftist former minister Yossi Beilin, to hold talks with Hamas in order to end its "international isolation." The Hamas representatives refused during the discussions to recognize the Jewish state as demanded by Israel and the West, while proposing a "truce of 20 or 30 years," the report said. Among the Israelis who participated in the talks were Yair Hirschfeld, an academic who was one of the main negotiators for the 1993 Oslo accords, and reserve general Shlomo Brom who is currently a researcher at Tel Aviv University. Ahmed Yussef, a close advisor to Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, was among the Hamas representatives.
