AMMAN, 3 September 2007 — Jordan’s King Abdallah called for the European Union to bridge differences between Israel and the Palestinians ahead of a US-sponsored peace conference in talks with visiting Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi yesterday. “King Abdallah and Prodi stressed the importance of increased efforts by the European Union to support peace in the Middle East and bring back the Palestinians and the Israelis to the negotiations table,” a palace statement said.
“It is necessary to bring closer the points of view between the Palestinians and Israelis in light of US President George W. Bush’s call for an international peace conference for the Middle East,” the king was quoted as saying. On Friday, the king, who is a close US ally, called on the Palestinians to close ranks and let “reason prevail” in order to benefit from the international conference, expected to take place in November.
Prodi said at the start of his visit to the kingdom on Saturday that his government would do everything to make the conference a success. “We are very positively engaged in the conference that will be held next November,” he told reporters after meeting his Jordanian counterpart Marouf Bakheet.
But the Italian prime minister warned that Palestinian divisions would undermine future moves for peace with Israel. “I feel that the divisions between the Palestinians will not help the peace process. I am sure that the Palestinian divisions will bring negative consequences to any future development in the area,” Prodi said.
The Islamist Hamas movement captured the Gaza Strip on June 15 from the secular Fatah forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, effectively splitting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. After his talks with the Prodi, the king left for Paris, where he is due to meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy on similar talks today.
Meanwhile, European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana was meeting Palestinian and Israeli leaders yesterday to prepare for the international Middle East peace conference later this year. “What we want to do is prepare the ground as part of the Quartet ... to pave the way for the conference,” Solana told reporters over breakfast in a Jerusalem hotel as he kicked off his trip to the region.
He was referring to the four main players in the Middle East peace process — Russia, the United Nations and the United States along with the EU. Abbas, who met Solana at his West Bank base in Ramallah later in the day, said that players must conduct detailed preparations if the meeting is to succeed. “We must prepare well for the international meeting because we don’t want to fail ... this meeting must succeed,” he said.
“We must agree on the time of the conference, who will be at the conference and what the results of the conference will be,” he said. He also pledged that any agreement that he may reach with Israel would be either put to a national referendum or before the parliament of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). “Any agreement that I may reach with Israelis I will put to a referendum or for agreement in the PLO Parliament,” he said.
Hamas is not a member of the PLO. Although no date and place for the US-called international meeting has been officially announced, Israeli officials have said they expect the meeting to take place in the United States in November, after the Jewish and Muslim holidays.
Solana said he came to the region “to see how we can prepare from here to December,” a period of time that “may be of great importance to the situation in the region.”
“We hope the outcome of the period will be positive and constructive for the peace process,” he said. The European Union is the Palestinians’ main aid donor as well as part of the Quartet.
In another development, international Middle East peace envoy Tony Blair arrived in Kuwait yesterday as he kicked off a two-week regional tour ahead of the US-sponsored conference.
Blair, who was appointed the Quartet envoy in late June after stepping down from a decade as British prime minister, is due to travel to Saudi Arabia and Egypt before arriving in Israel tomorrow, his spokesman Matthew Doyle said in a statement.
