Senior Jerusalem officials dismissed on Sunday a sudden surge of interest both here and abroad in the Arab Peace Initiative, saying it was a function of both a diplomatic process that has stalled and the transition periods in Israel, the US and the Palestinian Authority.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
Photo: AP [file]
"Whenever the process stalls, there will be those who will pull out the Saudi plan," one senior official said Sunday. "And the Saudis have an interest in pushing this out there now, to put on a 'constructive face' with which to greet the new US president."
The Arab Peace Initiative, based on the Saudi peace plan of February 2002, calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from all territories taken in the Six Day War, including east Jerusalem, in exchange for normalizing ties with the Arab world.
It also calls for the return to Israel of Palestinian refugees and their descendents.
The plan seems to be all the rage in recent days. President Shimon Peres reportedly talked with Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef about the need to go for a regional agreement, not just a bilateral one with Syria or the Palestinians, while King Abdullah II of Jordan told Spain's El Pais daily that the plan provided a genuine opportunity for a peace settlement.
In Britain, The Guardian newspaper ran a story entitled "Time to resurrect the Arab peace plan."
Labor Party head Ehud Barak also got into the fray, telling Army Radio on Sunday he discussed the plan recently with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during their coalition negotiations.
Barak, like Peres, said that with little movement on the separate bilateral tracks with the Palestinian Authority and Syria, it could be beneficial to go after a wider regional settlement.
"There is definitely room to introduce a comprehensive Israeli plan to counter the Saudi plan, that would be the basis for a discussion on overall regional peace," he said.
The problem with all this talk, another senior diplomatic official in Jerusalem said, is that it ignores what happened just last year.
The Saudi plan was "relaunched" in March 2007 in Riyadh, and shortly afterward the Arab League tasked Egypt and Jordan, because of their diplomatic ties with Israel, with bringing the plan to Jerusalem.
Amid no small amount of fanfare, Egypt's Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit and Jordan's Foreign Minister Abdelelah al-Khatib came, but after a press conference with Livni in which their arrival as an Arab League delegation was hailed as a historic development, nothing was heard of the working group again.
"They presented the plan as take it or leave it," one official remembered, and when Israel asked for clarifications, which were to be dealt with by the Arab League, the whole issue disappeared.
Now, the official said, "the negotiations with the Palestinians are stalled, coalition talks are under way and various ideas are thrown out there.
"It's also Succot; there is not much going on, so half-formed ideas that are discussed in the framework of coalition talks get a lot more traction than they normally would."
Finally, the official said, "There is no government to talk to about this. Not here, not in the PA and not in the US."
The official warned against expecting to see any new diplomatic initiatives launched or picked up at this time - Arab League initiatives or otherwise - because it isn't clear what the next Israeli government will look like, or when it will be sworn in; no one knows who will be in control of the Palestinian Authority on January 10, the day Hamas has said it will no longer recognize Mahmoud Abbas as PA president. In addition, the makeup of the next US administration is unclear.
