Al Jazeera News :
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was smiling and gesturing as he posed for pictures alongside Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda who hosted him in the city of Entebbe on Monday; but it was another meeting, far from the media glare, that made international headlines – and raised eyebrows.
In an unannounced move, Netanyahu on Monday also held talks with Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of Sudan’s sovereign council, a joint civilian-military transitional body that has been governing the country since August last year in the wake of longtime President Omar al-Bashir’s overthrow months before.
Following the secret meeting, Israel said the two countries had agreed to move towards forging normal relations. Only two Arab states – Egypt and Jordan – have diplomatic ties with Israel.
“History!” tweeted Netanyahu, who is fighting for his political future ahead of a snap legislative election on March 2, the third in less than a year.
As news of the talks spread, protests reportedly erupted in Khartoum as Sudanese government ministers insisted they were unaware of the meeting and had heard about it through the media.
Al-Burhan himself only made his first public remarks about it the next day after briefing the council and the cabinet.
“I took this step from the standpoint of my responsibility … to protect the national security of Sudan and achieve the supreme interests of the Sudanese people,” Burhan said in a statement on Tuesday.
The meeting came two days after the Arab League, of which Sudan is a member, joined Palestinian leaders in rejecting US President Donald Trump’s Middle East plan, which he unveiled while standing alongside Netanyahu at the White House last week.
The plan proposed a two-state solution to the decades-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict, with a new Palestinian capital outside of Jerusalem while maintaining the historic city as an “undivided capital” for Israel.
Economic crisis
From Sudan’s perspective, analysts said the meeting could in some measure be seen as part of efforts to help remove the country from a 1993 US list of “state sponsors of terrorism”, which has cut it off from financial markets and severely harmed its economy.
While the US in 2017 lifted a trade embargo on Sudan, the country’s inclusion in the terror list prevents it from accessing much-needed financial aid and limits potential foreign investment.
“Sudan is experiencing an economic crisis and the transitional council has been struggling to find a real solution to this,” Sudanese affairs expert Salahaddin Zein told Al Jazeera.
