The long awaited Euro-Med summit, which was scheduled to be convened next week in Barcelona, has been officially postponed following major rifts among the participants particularly between certain Arab states and Israel.
The postponement confirmed speculation in Brussels that the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM), created in 2008 on a French initiative, is dominated by infighting among members.
The meeting has now been pushed to the third week of November. The official reason given by the EU's Spanish presidency was that the two co-chairs of the UfM, Egypt and France, had agreed to postpone the summit "to give more time to prepare in order to guarantee its success".
The real reason, however, is the threat that Egypt and Syria will boycott the meeting if Israel's Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman takes part.
According to an EU presidency statement, it was agreed that the summit would be held in Barcelona in the third week of November, to coincide with the commemoration of 15th anniversary of the Conference of Barcelona of 1995, which marked the beginning of the Euro-Mediterranean process.
"The postponement will also allow the indirect Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which have just started, to bear fruit, which will create the suitable conditions to guarantee the success of the summit," the statement said. However, sources close to the UfM said the postponement of the summit had long been coming due to differences between some Arab states and Israel.
Malta, one of the major supporters of the Union, only recently announced the appointment of Permanent Secretary Cecilia Attard Pirotta, its top diplomatic official, to occupy one of the six posts of Deputy Secretary General at the organisation's seat in Barcelona. However, the Union's secretariat is the only concrete measure which has been put in place so far during the first two years of the UfM.
Some 43 countries from the EU and states bordering the Mediterranean Sea - including Israel, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria, as well as Jordan and the Palestinian Authority - were invited to attend the summit along with Malta.
The Union was set up in 2008 during the French EU presidency to replace the Barcelona process, which failed to achieve any major results since its foundation in 1995.