On Sunday and Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid hosted the Negev Summit, an unprecedented gathering in Sde Boker with the foreign ministers of the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Egypt, and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Lapid has since announced that the Negev Summit will become a permanent forum for regional cooperation. In this Israel Policy Briefing, moderated by Shira Efron (Director of Research, Israel Policy Forum), Nimrod Novik (Israel Fellow, Israel Policy Forum and former Israeli diplomat), Farah Bdour (Political Analyst, Amman Center for Peace and Development), and Amb. Hesham Youssef (Senior Fellow, U.S. Institute of Peace and former Egyptian diplomat) assess the impact of this historic summit on Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbors, as well as how the new forum—which thus far does not have Palestinian representation—could be leveraged in the future to further Israeli-Palestinian dialogue and preserve a political horizon for the two-state solution.
