Negev summit: strengthening the Arab-Israeli alliance or an American justification for the nuclear agreement

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The Negev (Israel) - The Negev summit raises the question of whether it is an additional step on the path of the Arab-Israeli alliance to confront Iran, given that it came days after the Sharm el-Sheikh summit, which was considered an announcement of the birth of the Arab-Israeli alliance, or whether its goal is to justify the United States of the agreement Nuclear and reassuring Israel and its Arab allies that the agreement will not lead to a free hand for Tehran in the region?

Observers considered that this summit sends messages to Iran that there is a united front against it and that many in the Middle East are not satisfied with Washington's performance in the face of Tehran's threats.

It is expected that the nuclear agreement will dominate the two-day extraordinary meeting hosted by Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid in the Negev desert and will include the foreign ministers of four Arab countries: the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Egypt, in addition to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken.

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Robert Malley: The IRGC will remain subject to sanctions

Blinken sought, during a joint press conference with his Israeli counterpart, held in Jerusalem, to reassure the participants that Washington would continue to confront any threat from Iran, even while promoting nuclear diplomacy with Tehran.

Blinken's visit comes as Washington's key allies, such as Israel and the United Arab Emirates, question the Biden administration's commitments to the region and prepare for the fallout from the nuclear deal with Iran and the Ukraine crisis.

Reviving the 2015 nuclear deal "is the best way to restore Iran's nuclear program to the previous status," Blinken said.

"Whether that happens or not, our commitment to the basic principle that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon is unwavering," he added. "The United States will continue to confront Iran if it threatens us or threatens our allies or partners," he added.

On the other hand, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said after the meeting that Israel was "particularly concerned about the intention to remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from the US terrorism list, which is one of the conditions that Iran stipulated to agree to revive the agreement."

The US Secretary of State did not address the issue during the press conference, but the US special envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, stressed at the Doha conference that "the Iranian Revolutionary Guard will remain subject to sanctions under US law."

Mali added that he was not confident that a nuclear deal between Western powers and Iran was imminent, reducing expectations after 11 months of talks in Vienna.

Kamal Kharazi, an advisor to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has confirmed that an agreement may be imminent.

"In order to revive the agreement, it is important for the United States to remove the Iranian Revolutionary Guard from the list of foreign terrorist organizations," Kharazi said.

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Arab countries, especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia, view the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as the greatest threat; The Quds Force, a branch of the Revolutionary Guards, helps Iran spread its influence in the Middle East through proxies in Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria.

The Revolutionary Guard is a mixture of militias that control many aspects of politics in the region, in addition to possessing weapons that threaten the countries of the region at various levels, whether by targeting oil facilities or infrastructure, such as what the Houthis are targeting the UAE and Saudi Arabia or what they have done A strategic review by Iraqi militias targeting American bases, leading to the implementation of assassination attempts on senior political leaders in the region, as happened to Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kazemi.

In turn, Morocco accuses Iran and its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, of supporting the separatist Polisario Front and supplying it with weapons, which threatens its territorial integrity and unity.

On the other hand, the United States wants to speed up the return to the agreement, not only to limit Tehran's nuclear program, but to lift the strict sanctions on Tehran and allow it to return to the oil markets, which will contribute to increasing production and thus putting an end to the rise in prices.

The United States had failed to put pressure on the UAE and Saudi Arabia to increase oil production, amid frequent reports of tension between the two countries on the one hand and Washington on the other.

The price of a barrel of oil rose to $120 a barrel, coinciding with the mounting concern of investors about the exacerbation of market confusion to the extent that no one may be able to control it due to the tightening of Western sanctions on Moscow.