Israeli Foreign Minister names Israeli Bedouin as political advisor
Jerusalem - New Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, has appointed an Israeli-Arab Bedouin as his political advisor for the Middle East, the Israeli Yediot Ahranot daily reported Sunday.
Ismail Khalidi, currently Israel's deputy consul-general in San Francisco, will take up his new position in the coming weeks. He is the first Bedouin to serve in the Israeli diplomatic corps.
Lieberman, whose uncompromising nationalist outlook has seen him frequently accused of racism, had wanted an adviser for Middle Eastern affairs who is familiar with the region and speaks Arabic as his mother tongue.
Khalidi, 38, is the unmarried third son in a family of 11 from Arab al-Hawald, a western Galilee village which has no electricity, running water, school or medical clinic.
Lieberman, meanwhile, is slated to leave next month on his first trip to Europe as foreign minister. He will visit Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, to meet the foreign ministers of those countries and to lay the groundwork for the EU Israel Association Council meeting, likely to be held in Prague on May 18.
The council is the forum in which Israeli and the European Union representative will discuss the plans to upgrade Israeli-EU relations.
The meeting is considered crucial by Israel, in light of calls to link upgrading Israeli-EU relations to progress in the Israeli- Palestinian peace process.
Lieberman recently disavowed the so-called Annapolis peace process, named after a November 2007 summit which led to the renewal of Israel-Palestinian peace talks.
Instead, the foreign minister said, Israel would only be bound by the "roadmap" peace plan, a performance-based initiative which fell apart shortly after it was launched in 2003. (dpa)