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Barak Hails Mubarak for "Balanced Approach" at Arab Summit
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak Sunday commended Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's behavior at the just-concluded Arab summit as "showing both courage and responsibility."
Barak told the weekly session of the Israeli cabinet that the Egyptian leader showed a significant amount of courage in maintaining a balanced approach, calling for peace and restraining extremist views in the two-day summit held in the Egyptian capital of Cairo.
Barak said Mubarak has conducted the summit with responsibility and level-headedness, viewing regional peace and an Israeli-Palestinian agreement as a main goal for all states in the region.
"Mubarak is a leader of recognized international and Arab stature who works to protect Palestinian rights. It seems that he is leading the summit in a responsible and considered fashion and sees regional peace and Israeli-Palestinian agreement as the main goal for all states in the region," he said.
The Arab summit, the first one in four years, concluded on Sunday condemning Israel's "barbaric massacres" of Palestinians in the past three weeks' clashes but fell short of cutting off all diplomatic ties with the Jewish state as some hard-line countries had called for.
Earlier, Israeli government spokesman Nachman Shai praised the victory of wisdom at the summit by Egypt and Jordan, which refrained from severing their diplomatic ties with Israel.
In the final communique, the Arab leaders called on the United Nations to set up a war criminal tribunal to try Israelis responsible for the massacre of Palestinians. They also called for the creation of two funds worth 1 billion U.S. dollars to help the Palestinians.
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