Israel?
Diplomacy? What can I say? I'll believe it when I see it.
Israel
and Iran hold 'positive' nuclear talks in Brussels
Brussels
conference could help pave way for full international conference on
banning weapons of mass destruction in Middle East
5
November, 2012
Israeli
and Iranian officials are taking part in a on nuclear proliferation
meeting in Brussels on Monday, in the hope of paving the way for a
full international conference in the next few months on banning
nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction from the Middle
East.
A
handful of officials from both Israel and Iran are involved in the
two-day event, ostensibly in their capacity as private citizens, in
what was billed as an academic seminar.
But
the delegations are led by senior officials and have the permission
of their respective governments to take part in an informal
discussion with representatives from about 10 Arab states, US
officials and European moderators to explore the possibility of
holding a UN-sponsored conference on establishing a WMD-free zone in
the Middle East.
The
Israeli team is led by Jeremy Issacharoff, an ambassador for
strategic affairs at the foreign ministry; the chief Iranian
representative is Ali Asghar Soltanieh, the country's long-serving
ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna. Also
taking part is Jaakko Laajava, the Finnish diplomat tasked by the UN
secretary general to organise the planned conference in Helsinki.
In
contrast to the ever-worsening sabre-rattling over the Iranian
nuclear programme, the mood at the meeting, convened by the EU
Non-Proliferation Consortium, was described by one participant as
"respectful and positive".
Mark
Fitzpatrick, a non-proliferation expert from the International
Institute for Strategic Studies and former state department official,
said "there were no fireworks and no denunciations" at the
conference. That marks an improvement over a similar event held last
year, when the tone was described as mutual finger-wagging. However,
it was unclear from the meeting whether the Helsinki conference would
go ahead on schedule in December.
Washington
has been going out of its way in recent weeks to brief observers that
the talks would be postponed, although it was not clear whether that
was a tactic to avoid reports emerging in the midst of the election
campaign that the US had pressured Israel to sit at the negotiating
table with Iran.
Two
junior US officials are taking part in this week's meeting but have
so far said little. One source said Washington's intentions would be
clear once the elections were over, but noted that participants had
taken to calling the UN-sponsored event the 'Helsinki conference',
rather than the '2012 conference', as uncertainty increases over its
timing.
Israel's
official position is neither to confirm nor deny its widely reported
nuclear arsenal, and it would consider signing the nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty, thereby renouncing its right to have such
weapons, only if its existence and its right to exist had been
guaranteed by its neighbours and the region was at peace.
Nevertheless,
European mediators hope the UN conference will initially represent a
way of coaxing Israel into more transparency in return for continued
Arab and Iranian abstinence from nuclear weapons under the
increasingly strained treaty.
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