Cairo, October 21: Egypt is opposed to extremist Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman attending a meeting of the Mediterranean Union which it co-chairs with France, diplomats said on Wednesday.
Foreign ministers of the 43-strong grouping, which brings European Union members together with states from north Africa, the Balkans, Arab countries, Israel and Turkey, are due to gather in November in Istanbul.
An Egyptian diplomat said that Cairo “did not want to send an invitation to the Israeli (foreign) minister,” but could accept that Lieberman be represented by someone else.
Egyptian officials refused anything to do with Lieberman after he said last year that President Hosni Mubarak could “go to hell” if he continued to refuse to visit Israel.
Earlier this year, Mubarak received hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for talks on the deadlocked Middle East peace process.
Other Arab members of the Mediterranean Union also have no wish to see the extremist Lieberman join the Istanbul forum because of his radical positions concerning the Palestinians, other diplomats said.
But an Israeli official in occupied Jerusalem claimed that Lieberman was not the problem.
“The issue from the beginning has been the refusal by Egypt and Arab countries to discuss joint cooperation projects with Israel,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
The Mediterranean Union was launched at a summit in Paris last year and is aimed at developing projects for regional integration in one of the most volatile regions of the world.
But like its regional predecessor, the Barcelona Process which stalled in large part over Arab-Israeli disputes, the union got bogged down by Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip at the turn of the year , which killed over 1,400 Palestinians, mainly civilians a third of whom children.
—Agencies