Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, is expected to enter Israel for the first time, and address Israeli audience during a conference in Netanya Aacademic College, in a ceremony marking the 10th anniversary of the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The ceremony is being held in cooperation with the Yitzhak Rabin Center for Israeli Studies, Israeli online daily Ynetnews reported.
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Abbas and Ahmad Qurei conditioned their participation with the continuance of Israeli-Palestinian talks, and the absence of firing incidents.
Jordan confirmed its participation and announced that Jordanian figures, including Dr. Abdul-Salam Al Majali, the Jordanian Prime Minister during the singing of the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty. .
Several international figures will also participate in the ceremony including Andalusia’s President Manuel Chaves, EU envoy Javier Solana, former Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid, Spanish Foreign Prime Minister Miguel Moratinos, the political adviser to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Osama El-Baz, and James Wolfensohn, former World Bank head.
The banner of the convention will be ‘Peace – a Dream or a Vision’, it will discuss several issued related to Rabin, such ‘Rabin and Egypt’, ‘Rabin and King Hussein’, ‘Rabin and the Palestinian problem’, ‘Rabin and Syria and Lebanon’, ‘Rabin and the U.S.’, as well as the region’s water problem, the Ynet reported.
A spokesperson of the Netanya Academic College said on Sunday that the Israeli retired Major-General Danny Yatom, chairman of the college’s Strategic Dialogue Center, personally contacted Abbas and Qurei, and invited them to participate in the conference.
Both Abbas and Qurei accepted the invitation and said that they would be happy to address the audience, a statement issued by the Academic reads.
