JEDDAH, 27 February — US President George W. Bush yesterday telephoned Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, and praised a Middle East peace initiative of the crown prince. The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said he is cutting short a visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories and coming here today to discuss Crown Prince Abdullah’s peace plan. And Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed readiness to meet Saudi officials.
The proposal by Crown Prince Abdullah calls on Arab states to recognize Israel and normalize relations with the Jewish state in return for a full Israeli withdrawal from lands occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
But the initiative “doesn’t in itself change anything on the ground in the Middle East. The situation remains complicated and very violent,” Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters in Washington.
And “nothing has changed”. Bush believes that the plan devised by an international team headed by ex-Senator George Mitchell is “the best path, best process to achieve a comprehensive peace agreement” between Israelis and Palestinians, the spokesman said.
After meeting Sharon in Jerusaem, Solana said the Israeli premier considered the Saudi proposal “an interesting idea”.
He said Sharon “would like to know more about the content and he would be ready to meet anybody from Saudi Arabia, formally, informally, publicly, discreetly, whatever, to get better information about this initiative”.
Egypt and Jordan, the only Arab countries to have made peace with Israel, called on the Jewish state to “react positively” to the Saudi peace initiative, Egyptian Information Minister Safwat Al-Sherif said. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Abdallah, who met in Cairo, “called on the Israeli government to react positively to the Arab initiatives aimed at establishing a just and comprehensive peace, namely the ideas recently proposed by Saudi Arabia,” Sherif said.
Despite a new spasm of violence on Monday, US-brokered security talks between Israel and the Palestinians were held last night. The Palestinian Cabinet said it approved a resumption of talks to underline its calls for a cease-fire.
