In an interview with Syrian newspaper al-Watan, [Yemen's Information Minister Hassan] al-Lawzi confirmed that the Yemeni government has strong ties with the United States.I don't quite understand the highlighted sentence; I think he is saying that since the US needs Yemen to help fight Al Qaeda, it no longer pressures the country to move to normalize relations with Israel.
‘’These ties protect Yemen from Zionist pressures’’, said Al-Lawzi, adding the relation between Yemen and the Unites states is developed to combat a joint threat, ‘’which is the crimes of al-Qaeda’’.
‘’Pressures were put on Yemen to compromise the Arab unanimously and to establish relations with Israel’’, al-Lawzi said.
‘’Yemen's relations with the United States are strong, but not on the expense of the Palestinian people and national interests. Yemen went through bitter experiences of which the most dangerous was the export of revolutions’’, he stressed. ‘’However, it overcame that’’, he added.
What is happening in Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia shows that there were conspiracies to stress the "Zionist entity" and others against Arab countries, including Yemen.
More notable is that a minister of an Arab state, presumably an educated man, thinks that somehow events in Iraq, Somalia and the Sudan are really due to Zionist interests. This all-encompassing obsession with Israel is not merely a Palestinian Arab symptom but deeply embedded in the psyches of hundreds of millions of Arabs whose lives are not affected by events in Israel at all.
And this is yet another reason why real peace is simply not in the cards - as long as so many Arab leaders' visions are fatally skewed by irrational hate, nothing can be done to mollify them short of destroying Israel altogether. This minister's opinion might be brushed off as irrelevant, but it is not aberrant.