Eduardo González
The Foreign Ministers of Spain and Italy, Arancha González Laya and Luigi Di Maio, announced yesterday their intention to travel together this summer to Israel and Palestine to try to promote dialogue between the parties.
The announcement was first made by Di Maio during his participation in a telematic forum, in which he assured that the Italian government has “several initiatives” underway jointly with the Spanish government to try to relaunch the peace process, including a trip by the two foreign ministers to the region at the end of July.
González Laya later confirmed this initiative during a joint press conference with Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein at the Viana Palace in Madrid. “The Italian Foreign Minister and I intend to travel shortly to Israel and Palestine with the objective, as it cannot be otherwise, of dialoguing with the two countries to anchor the cease-fire that exists at the moment”, she declared.
The two ministers will also discuss “issues related to the health response” and will try to “open channels for dialogue between Israel and Palestine that respond to the need to re-establish trust and the possibility of both countries living in peace and security”, added Gonzalez Laya. This initiative is “a sign of the good harmony and excellent relationship between Spain and Italy, being as we are two Mediterranean countries committed to the southern neighborhood and who want to contribute, in a modest but consistent way, to peace”, she concluded.
During his speech, Di Maio recalled that this year marks the 30th anniversary of the Madrid Conference and warned of the need to relaunch diplomacy after the “dramatic” events that have recently taken place in the region, such as the Israeli army’s offensive in the Gaza Strip. Last December, González Laya declared during a tour of Jerusalem and Ramallah – in which she met with Israeli and Palestinian authorities – that the thirtieth anniversary of the Madrid Peace Conference, “which initiated negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians to seek two States living in peace and security, side by side”, should help to “promote the resumption of dialogue”, for which she offered Spain as an “active promoter of peace” in the Middle East.
The trip of Gonzalez Laya and Di Maio will coincide with the recent appointment of Naftali Bennett as Prime Minister of Israel, after twelve years of Benjamin Netanyahu’s mandate, and of Yair Lapid as Israel’s Foreign Minister. Bannett belongs to the nationalist Yamina party, which favors the annexation of a significant part of the West Bank, a position that seriously complicates the two-state solution. However, his government includes an unprecedented coalition of eight centrist, leftist and even Arab parties, which makes it more unpredictable in this respect. Moreover, according to the coalition agreement, Naftali Bennett will leave office in two years’ time in favor of Yair Lapid, of the centrist Yesh Atid party. In the case of Palestine, the situation is particularly deadlocked following President Mahmoud Abbas’s decision to suspend the first elections in fifteen years.
