World leaders including United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon paid tribute to King Abdullah’s efforts to address regional and international challenges at a time of turmoil and rapid changes.

Ban also praised him for being the driving force behind the Arab Peace Initiative (API) in 2002 and for leaving a “tangible legacy that can still point the way toward peace in the Middle East.”

The peace initiative proposed in 2002 at the Beirut Summit of the Arab League by then Crown Prince Abdullah was a bold attempt to end the Arab-Israeli conflict and to normalize Arab world’s relations with Israel in exchange for Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Palestinian territories. Had it been taken seriously by the US and Israel, it would have destroyed the raison d'être for the rise of Al-Qaeda and the ISIS, both of which were fueled by the criminal nexus that lay at the heart of US aid and support for Israeli-sponsored terrorism against the Palestinian people.

Ariel Sharon designated by George Bush as “a man of peace” rejected the initiative on the grounds that it could not replace UN Resolutions 242 and 338, which call for negotiations. His response would have been credible if he had ever been willing to enter into any kind of meaningful bilateral negotiations with the Palestinians. Shimon Peres first welcomed the plan as “ fascinating” then gave superficial semantic reasons for dismissing it. The fact is that King Abdullah’s peace initiative was a proposal that had the potential for negotiations between both the Israelis and Palestinians but clearly the leaders of Israel, in contrast to the leaders of the Arab world, were not interested in the peace.

The Oxford Research Group published a report of their findings in October 2008:

“The consensus was that the API offers an agreement that is very much in the strategic interests of Israel. It was seen as a deal that the Founders of Israel would surely have embraced with characteristic boldness and negotiated with vigor. Participants agreed that there is no alternative framework that does or can effectively guarantee the future of a Jewish democratic state in 78 percent of mandate Palestine within the context of regional recognition and cooperation.”

The failure of successive Israeli governments in accepting the proposal as a basis for negotiations and their preference to build more illegal settlements in the occupied territories make a nonsense of Israel’s desire to live in peace with its Arab neighbors by reaching a just peace settlement. In March 2012 on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the peace initiative, Haaretz’s Akiva Eldan wrote that Israel’s failure to respond adequately to the Arab proposal was part of the country’s “ worst missed opportunity.”

On the other hand, Bush’s war on terror has been a massive failure because it has failed to address the issue that so concerned King Abdullah, namely the issue of US moral and financial support to the continued Israeli state terror against the Palestinians. This was most recently evident in the murder of over 2,000 innocent Palestinians in Gaza by the government of Netanyahu, cited as a legitimate response to the murder of three Jewish teenagers in the occupied territories, whose “Palestinian murderers” were killed only after the bombing and destruction of Gaza had been completed. We know that King Abdullah was rightly appalled by the disproportionate use of force. Clearly King Abdullah would be supporting President Abbas’ efforts to file criminal charges at the International Criminal Court against the Israeli leaders responsible for this barbaric act of genocide, which incidentally would never have occurred if the Israelis had accepted his peace initiative of 2002.

More than that however, King Abdullah would now be challenging Washington to make good on the US promise to commit to the implementation of a Palestinian state.

King Abdullah’s peace initiative contains the recipe for a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, which could also include Iranian recognition of Israel and it is perfectly compatible with UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.

It is the best recipe for de-escalating the rise of terrorist organizations. All that is sadly missing at this time are visionary statesmen dedicated to peace in the US, Europe and Israel who can match the caliber of King Abdullah.