By: Chicago Tribune

15.04.2010

King Abdullah II of Jordan visited the Tribune's editorial board Thursday to discuss challenges in the Middle East and the peace process. Excerpts:

Tribune: What should the United States be doing to advance the Middle East peace process?

Abdullah: There needs to be a U.S. umbrella that brings the two parties together. At this stage, people are not talking to each other. The challenge that we have is there are countries in the Middle East that do not believe in the Arab peace proposal. The Arab peace proposal is 22 Arab nations, plus the rest of the Muslim countries. That's 57 nations that have basically all agreed that they want to have full diplomatic relations with Israel, but in return, a two-state solution, therefore a future for the Palestinians. The challenge that we've had at the last two Arab summits is that there are countries saying, "Look, the Arab peace proposal doesn't work, dialogue doesn't work with Israel, and we should take the Arab peace proposal off the table." The red flag that I have at the moment is that leading up to the last summit, we managed to get an extension of the Arab peace proposal, which terminates in July. There will be a committee meeting of Arab countries in July, and for us as moderate countries, we're going to be challenged by everybody else: "Nothing has happened; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not interested in peace, so why keep the Arab peace proposal on the table?" If something doesn't happen until July, we're in trouble. What we're hoping for is active engagement by the Palestinians with the Americans, the Israelis with the Americans and then the Americans weighing in before July to say, "All right, here are the parameters of where the negotiations will start."

Tribune: Would you favor President Barack Obama presenting both sides with a peace plan?

Abdullah: I think it's up to us to do a lot of the heavy lifting at this stage. Why should the burden be solely on Obama and Americans to stick their necks out if both parties (the Israelis and the Palestinians) are not willing to do enough of the groundwork? The problem if we stay at the status quo, others in the region are not sitting idly by. So the chance of conflict is always very high. War would be disastrous for the Israelis, for the Arabs, for all of us. If we hit the summer and there's no active (peace) process, there's a very good chance for conflict, and nobody wins when it comes to that.