Israel will be prepared to enter “serious talks” with a group of Arab League states over their land-for-peace plan, deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said yesterday. The Arab proposal will be the focus of talks between Jordan’s King Abdullah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
The Arab plan offers Israel normal relations with the Arab world in return for a Palestinian state and full withdrawal from land seized in the 1967 Middle East war. The foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan, acting as an Arab League working group, briefed Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in Cairo on Thursday on the Arab peace offer for the first time. The working group is expected to send a delegation to Israel in the coming weeks. “If the Arab side will present the proposal, Israel will willingly come with its (own) offer in order to conduct serious talks in order to find common ground. This opportunity must not be missed,” Peres told a visiting American delegation, according to an Israeli official.
Peres did not offer any details about what this offer might entail. Israeli officials have been drafting a more detailed response to the initiative.
But a senior Israeli official said: “We have to get our house in order first. It’s a very long road.”
Olmert’s political future has been clouded by criticism levelled against him by an Israeli inquiry panel probing his decision to launch last year’s war against the Hezbollah guerrilla group in Lebanon, in which more than 1200 civilians lost their lives and properties worth billions of dollars were destroyed indiscriminately.
ISRAEL READYING FOR TALKS
Israel will be prepared to enter “serious talks” with a group of Arab League states over their land-for-peace plan, deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres said yesterday. The Arab proposal will be the focus of talks between Jordan’s King Abdullah, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
