Bush Gets Entire Arab League To Attend Mid-East Peace Conference

November 25, 2007 · Filed Under Middle East, World News

The Bush administration was able to declare victory when Syria, the last Arab world holdout, said Sunday it would attend this week’s high-stakes Mideast peace conference.

League members grudgingly agreed a few days ago to send their foreign ministers to the conference, meant to renew Israeli-Palestinian peace talks after a violent, seven-year lull in negotiations. Most members do not have ties with the Jewish state.

Syria had threatened to skip the three-day meetings in Annapolis, Md., and Washington, if they did not address the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Mideast war and later annexed. But with that issue added to the agenda, the deputy foreign minister, Faysal Mekdad, will participate.

Arab states had been reluctant to attend the gathering, which starts Monday in Washington. They feared it would give Israel a public- relations boost while yielding little political benefit for the Palestinians.

But they decided to come to the first large-scale Arab-Israeli gathering since a 1996 meeting in Egypt. That is largely because they wanted to bolster moderate Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and keep him from making damaging concessions to Israel in talks that are to follow the conference.

Abbas has been badly weakened by the Islamic Hamas group’s violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June, which left him in control of just the West Bank.