Qatar's foreign minister said on Sunday his country, a political maverick among Gulf Arab states, could consider signing a peace treaty with Israel if it suited its interests. Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani's comments are rare for a senior official in a region which rules out any normal ties with Israel before it withdraws from Arab land occupied since the 1967 Middle East War. "If we think it will serve our purpose and our country, we can study this (peace treaty)," Sheikh Hamad told CNN. But he said that Qatar, which does not share a border with the Jewish state, was satisfied for now with its low-level trade ties with Israel, which have angered many Arab countries. Qatar set up trade ties with Israel after a landmark Arab-Israeli peace conference in 1991. But one month after the Palestinian uprising erupted in September 2001, Doha shut the Israeli representative office in Doha to avoid the collapse of an Islamic summit it was hosting that year after several Arab and Muslim countries threatened to boycott the meeting.
| That "Arab solidarity" stuff does tend to inhibit cutting away from the herd, doesn't it? Not a good thing, when the herd tends to stampede off cliffs... |
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