arab conference
© Reuters
A conference of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo, Saturday 21, 2013.
Arab foreign ministers on Saturday sided with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and rejected the security plan presented by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry as part of Israeli-Palestinian talks.

At an emergency meeting called at the request of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Saturday, Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Araby said there could be not one Israeli soldier in the territory of a future Palestine.

But a resolution he read at the end of the meeting did not repeat the harshly critical language of a report circulated to the Arab delegates ahead of the gathering. The position of the report - based mainly on the Palestinian stance - is that Kerry's plan is skewed in favor of Israel and secures prolonged Israeli military presence in the Jordan River Valley, while the Palestinian demands will only be addressed at a later stage.

The report, seen by Reuters, said the U.S. security proposals "achieved Israeli security expansionist demands, and guaranteed (Israel's) continued control of (the Jordan Valley) on the security pretext".

Implicit in al-Arabi's report is an accusation against the U.S. administration for backtracking on its previous commitments by adopting Israel's insistence on the security plan as a condition for the negotiations' progress.

During his visit in Cairo, Abbas will also meet with Egyptian top brass, including intelligence chiefs in charge of the reconciliation process between Fatah and Hamas.

The Palestinians argue that throughout all the negotiations conducted with Israel in the 20 years since Oslo was signed, the Jordan Valley was discussed in the context of security arrangements. But in the talks that began some four months ago, Israel started addressing this separately from the security issue. "Israel is doing all it can to lengthen the negotiations by bringing more and more clauses to the table, to cause a delay and to make the talks so cumbersome and complicated that they won't produce any practical results," a source told Haaretz.

This dovetails with the prevailing opinion among the Palestinians in recent weeks, and particularly after Kerry's most recent visit, that Kerry no longer qualifies as a neutral mediator. Sources described the meeting with him last week in Ramallah as being a very difficult one, a meeting that left the Palestinian side uncertain as to the future of the talks, despite Abbas' declaration that he would stick with the negotiating process for the allocated nine months.