EU foreign ministers and their Mediterranean counterparts met for trade and security talks, but the Arab members vowed to boycott Israel's Shimon Peres in protest to the Middle East violence that was rapidly hijacking the agenda.
Two Arab member nations -- Lebanon and Syria -- had already announced they would not attend the two-day meeting in the eastern Spanish port city of Valencia to protest Israel's offensive against Palestinians.
Then late Monday, shortly before the opening session, Arab diplomats said all Arab ministers had agreed to boycott Tuesday's scheduled speech by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.
"We decided to leave the hall when Peres gets up to speak in protest against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories," an Arab diplomat told AFP. He said, too, that the Arab delegations had vowed to make the Middle East situation the central theme of the opening session.
Conference organizers meanwhile said Peres' arrival had been delayed for "technical reasons," and that he would miss the opening session.
On Sunday, Peres said he expected to feel lonely at this week's meeting of European and Middle Eastern foreign ministers. "I regret the European reaction. ... Where in Europe, at the beginning, anti-Semitism was against the individual Jewish person, today I am afraid there is anti-Semitism against the Jewish state," he told American supporters of Israel.
"Maybe there are many European politicians who represent the future of Europe. We Jewish people cannot forget the past of Europe, and we would expect the Europeans to remember what we didn't forget and to judge us in a real and balanced way, as they should," he added.
Peres was speaking to the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the largest pro-Israeli lobbying organization in the United States. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
