Arab leaders fully back a Palestinian refusal to recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish state’, a flashpoint issue which is threatening to derail the US-led peace talks, a final Arab summit statement said on Wednesday.
“We express our total rejection of the call to consider Israel as a Jewish state,” said the declaration, issued at the end of the two-day meeting in Kuwait City.
The Palestinians recognised Israel at the start of the peace process in the early 1990s, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has insisted they now acknowledge it as the national homeland of the Jewish people, in a move which would effectively torpedo the ‘right of return’ for Palestinian refugees. The league had already rejected the demand, in a statement issued from its Cairo headquarters earlier this month.