It might be the African Union, but high on the agenda at the opening of this week’s AU summit in Addis Ababa was the Middle East as declarations were made against the proposed US Middle East Peace Proposal in solidarity with Palestinians.
US President Donald Trump called it the “Deal of the century”.
However, during the opening of the AU Summit in the Ethiopian capital on Sunday, it was ripped to pieces as the head of the AU, Moussa Faki Mahamat said it had been “conceived and elaborated outside of any international consideration, and worse still, in absence of the main concerns of the Palestinians.”
The deal essentially would create a truncated Palestine, surrounded by Israel’s territory and with pockets of Jewish settlements. One expert went as far as to compare it to the British Balfour declaration of 1917; the very thing that started the whole process towards an Israeli state.
Even stronger were the words from South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa, in his first speech as this year’s sitting chairman of the AU.
“It brought to mind a horrible history that we as South Africans have gone through. The apartheid regime once imposed a Bantustan type of system on the people of South Africa, without consultation with them, and with all the oppressive elements that the plan had. As I listened to the Arab League, and as I listened to our colleagues from Palestine, it sound like this plan.”