Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The Egyptian and Jordanian Ambassadors on Thursday called on Israel to accept the 2002 Arab Peace Plan, as the best path forward to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Egypt still believes that reaching a peace agreement is achievable,” Egypt Ambassador to Israel Hazem Khairat said in a rare public address to the Israeli public which he delivered at the 2016 Herzliya Conference.

He pledged that his country would continue to work for a just peace that restores security to the region. This includes “activating the Arab Peace Initiative,” Khairat said.

The Arab Peace Plan, also known as the Saudi Initiative, offers Israel normalized ties with the Arab world in exchange for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and a solution to the Palestinian refugees.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the last month has called for a regional peace process based on a revised version of the initiative. He has said that those revisions should take into account the upheavals and changes to the region in the last 14 years, but has not laid out his vision of what those revisions should entail.

Israel has preferred a regional peace process, where it hopes that it would have more leverage than in the newly launched French initiative which it fears would simply dictate a resolution to the conflict that would be harmful to Israel.

But Khairat said his country thought both initiatives were important.

“Egypt welcomes the French initiative as contributing to the framework of international action” toward ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Khairat said and added that it has already “made a new step toward peace.”

“Israelis and Palestinians should make peace because they must. The two state solution is the only way to end this conflict. There is not much time left and there is no other alternative,” he said.

The absence of hope, contributed to regional instability, he said. It also feeds global and regional terrorism, Khairat said.

Jordan’s Ambassador to Israel Walid Obeidat, who also shared the stage with him in Herzliya, also called for an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal based on the Arab Peace Plan and spoke in support of the French initiative.

“The Arab Peace initiative stands as the master of all initiatives when we talk about regional approaches,” Obeidat said.

The plan has the support of 58 Arab countries, Obeidat said.

“What more could Israel ask for than this?” Obeidat added.

Renewed interest in the Arab Peace Plan is a welcome development, he added.

Peace between Israelis and Palestinians is in Jordan’s vital national interest, he said. Jordan will do its utmost to help the Israelis and Palestinians move forward,” he said.

PLO official Elias Zananiri told the Herzliya conference that part of the problem was Netanyahu’s reluctance to make peace with the Palestinians. Now it wants to skip over the Palestinians all together in hopes of normalizing ties with the Arab world without resolving that primary conflict, Zananiri said.

Netanyahu has the capacity to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but he has to want to do so, Zananiri said.

“If [former prime minister] Menachem Begin could make peace, so can Netanyahu,” Zananiri said.

Former head of the Quartet’s Jerusalem Mission Robert Danin explained that both Israel and the Arab world had warmed to the plan over time.

When the Saudis first proposed it, they had their eye more on improving their ties with Washington post the September 11th 2001 attack on the Twin Towers in New York.

When the Arab League endorsed it, it did so “grudgingly,” almost as if it was “a fax under the door,” he said.

Since then, however, it “has endured and evolved.”

This is not “a take it or leave it document,” he said. It was also amended in 2013, to include the idea of land swaps in seeing the final borders of the two-state solution,” he said.

On Wednesday, however, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger who spoke to the conference through a video hook up, said that the Arab Peace Plan was no longer viable in a regional climate where states like Syria, Iraq and Libya were disintegrating. It is impossible, therefore, to know who could be the partners for such a regional plan, he said.

In a media interview last week, Arab League Secretary General Nabil al-Arabi said he was not interested in amending the plan any further, thereby rejecting Netanyahu’s offer.

But his words have not doused the drive among those who support the initiative from pushing to use it as a basis for a regional process.

A non-profit group, the Israeli Peace Initiative, showed a video at the panel with quotes from regional politicians who support the plan.

Former Saudi General Anwar Eshkl said “Saudi Arabia would like to live together, with Israel and the Arab countries.”

He added, “I’m willing to defend peace with all my heart.”

*JP