DAMASCUS, (Islamweb & News Agencies) -Fourteen Arab countries, with the notable absence of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and a handful of Gulf states, met Monday for the second day to bolster the Muslim world's economic boycott of Israel, but failed to reach an agreement on the issue of indirect boycott.
"We want to reactivate the boycott so that it constitutes an instrument of peaceful resistance with the aim of pushing Israel back to reason," said Ahmed Khazaa, head of the Arab League's central boycott office.
The first large-scale gathering of the Damascus-based Central Office for the Boycott of Israel (OBI) in eight years came against the backdrop of the 10-month Palestinian uprising.
But the participants failed to reach an agreement on a clause providing for the boycott of foreign companies doing business with the Jewish state.
The blueprint called for blacklists of Israeli firms and foreign companies dealing with the Jewish state to be published every six months.
However, the 14 agreed to keep the clause calling for a boycott of Israeli exports towards Arab countries, including Egypt and Jordan, which have a peace treaty with Israel.
However, and according to annanomous sources, the participants appear to have agreed on the need to reopen boycott offices in the 22 member countries of the Arab League.
"There is total agreement. There are not any problems," Ahmed Khazaa, head of the Arab League's central boycott office, told reporters, although the committee failed again to attain a full two-thirds quorum necessary to hold an executive meeting for the first time since 1993.
Khazaa said on the first day of the conference on Sunday that a revitalised boycott could cost Israel an estimated three billion dollars per year.
Besides Syria and the Palestinian Authority, 12 countries attended the meeting: Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
The boycott office was established in 1951 and used to publish every six months a blacklist of Israeli businesses and foreign firms trading with the state.
After the 1991 Gulf War and the launch of the Middle East peace process, most of the Arab countries yielded to US pressure and lifted the boycott of third party companies dealing with Israel, but not on Israeli companies.
The easing of the boycott allowed firms, such as soft drinks giant Coca-Cola and the automobile firm Ford Motor Company, to gain a foothold in Arab markets.
The reactivation of the OBI was discussed at the March 27-28 Arab summit in Amman at the request of Syria, which is pushing for a tougher stance against hardline Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
However, efforts to hold an executive meeting of the OBI have failed since then because of the quorum rule which requires the attendance of two-thirds of the chiefs of all Arab states' boycott offices.
The two-day meeting did not require a quorum since it was only a gathering of experts from Arab League states reviewing the revival of the boycott.