RIYADH: Washington could use its aid as a lever to push Israel into a two-state settlement with the Palestinians, Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal said in an interview published yesterday.
“The United States has the means to persuade the Israelis to work for a peaceful settlement,” Prince Saud told Newsweek magazine. “It needs to tell them that if it is going to continue to help them, they must be reasonable and make reasonable concessions.”
Asked if Washington should cut off aid to Israel, Prince Saud replied: “Why not? If you give aid to someone and they indiscriminately occupy other people’s lands, you bear some responsibility.”
The interview was conducted Friday, a day after US President Barack Obama’s landmark address to the Muslim world in Cairo.
Prince Saud praised Obama’s “sincerity” and his calling Israel’s expansion of West Bank settlements as “not legitimate,” but said the speech “has yet to be translated into actions.” And he fended off Washington’s call for Arab states to make diplomatic overtures to Israel to get new peace negotiations off the ground.
“We don’t have anything to offer Israel except normalization, and if we put that before the return of Arab land we are giving away the only chip in the hands of Arab countries,” Prince Saud said.
In Caen, France, Obama said yesterday he wanted to see “serious, constructive” Middle East peace talks this year aimed at finding a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians.
On the final leg of a brief tour of the Middle East and Europe, Obama was asked to clarify what he meant the previous day in Germany when he said he was confident progress could be made between the Palestinians and Israel this year.
“Progress would mean the parties involved ... are in serious, constructive negotiations toward a two-state solution,” Obama told reporters after a meeting with his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy in Normandy ahead of a ceremony to mark the 65th anniversary of the World War II D-Day landings.
“I do not expect that a 60-year problem is solved overnight but, as I have said before, I do expect both sides to recognize that their fates are tied together,” he added.
Obama has called for a freeze in settlements and pressed for a two-state solution, both of which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted.
But Obama also said that while the media had made much of his comments on settlements, he also wanted the Palestinians to renounce “violence and incitement.”
“We have to move beyond the current stalemate,” he added.
Obama underlined the need for “tough diplomacy” in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program and said he would be firm with North Korea as well after its second atomic bomb explosion.
Obama has said he is prepared to hold talks with Tehran “without preconditions” in a bid to ensure that it does not use its advanced nuclear technology to develop weapons. Iran says it is only trying to meet its booming demand for electricity.
Obama said France was being firm with Iran. He praised “France’s leadership in Europe in understanding the need for us to have tough diplomacy with the Iranians, to reach out to them and also insist that we can’t afford to have a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.”
Iran has so far spurned approaches by six world powers — France, Britain, Germany, the United States, China and Russia — that have offered a package of incentives aimed at convincing it to abandon uranium enrichment, which can produce fuel for power plants or, potentially, nuclear weapons.
Sarkozy met Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki in Paris last week. Mottaki delivered a message from “the highest Iranian authorities” and said Tehran was finalizing a counterproposal to the package, a French official said.
With Iran’s presidential elections just six days away, Sarkozy said he told Mottaki Iran needed to agree to talks soon. “I told him that they have to seize the hand stretched out by Barack Obama, set a date so that the Group of Six (powers) can begin to talk,” Sarkozy added.
