Kuwait Times

Published Date: November 28, 2007
By Lydia Georgi

Saudi participation in a US-hosted peace meeting will signal that Arabs are ready to forge ties with Israel if it withdraws from occupied lands, but does not mean that Riyadh is normalising relations, Saudi analysts said on Monday. It was natural that Saudi Arabia should attend Tuesday's conference at Annapolis in Maryland, designed to relaunch stalled peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, since it was the author of the Arab peace plan serving as one of the bases of the meeting, the pundits said
.

Saudi Arabia would not be there if there was no "clear agenda," according to Anwar Eshki, who heads a Jeddah-based private think tank. A Saudi condition was that the conference should not be the setting for normalising ties "even in the most reduced form, such as a handshake" between Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal and Israeli officials, Eshki told AFP.

Normalisation will come only after peace negotiations are completed, but at the same time Riyadh's attendance alongside more than a dozen Arab countries "will show the Israeli side that we are ready for normalisation if (Israel) meets all the conditions" conducive to peace, he said. "Israel is interested in winning over Saudi Arabia, so it will be careful not to alienate" the regional powerhouse by trying to engineer direct contacts at Annapolis, Eshki argued.

Mohammad Al-Zulfa, a member of the appointed Shura (consultative) Council, noted that Riyadh was the driving force behind the initiative endorsed by all Arab states, under which they would establish ties with Israel if it withdraws from lands seized in the 1967 war and allows a Palestinian state to be created. The presence at the conference of some 50 countries and organisations, including Saudi Arabia, is tantamount to telling Israel that "we guarantee there will be peace" if it commits to withdraw from a
ll occupied territories, Zulfa told AFP.

However the fact that Prince Saud will sit in the same room as Israeli leaders "does not mean that Saudi Arabia has started to forge relations" with the Jewish state. "There will be no normalisation with Israel unless it agrees to a full withdrawal from Arab lands occupied in 1967 and to the creation of a Palestinian state with (east) Jerusalem as its capital," he said. A Riyadh-based Arab diplomat told AFP on Saturday that Saudi Arabia has informed the United States that it wants no encounters with the Is
raelis in Annapolis.

The Saudis told Washington that they do not want to meet anyone from the Israeli delegation, either by chance or by prior arrangement. Hence it was decided that... delegations would enter the meeting room from different doors," he said. Saudi Arabia was present at the international conference which launched Arab-Israeli peace negotiations in Madrid in 1991, but this will be the first time it has such high-level representation at a meeting attended by Israel.

Zulfa said US President George W. Bush was the first US leader to commit to establishing a Palestinian state, a stand which Riyadh played a major role in bringing about because of the "special relationship" between Bush and the Saudi ruling family. In addition, the Arab peace plan revived at a Riyadh Arab League summit in March has also been adopted as a basis of the conference, along with UN resolutions and the international Quartet's roadmap, which makes it inconceivable that Saudi Arabia would not atten
d, he added. Zulfa dismissed Iranian criticism of Riyadh's decision to go to Annapolis as "a kind of outbidding.

Saudi Arabia is an Arab country seeking stability in the region and (the restoration of) Arab rights. Iran has no problem. If it improves ties with the United States it will deal with Israel differently," he said. Iranian media on Monday reported President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as telling Saudi King Abdullah in a telephone conversation on Sunday that he wished the kingdom was not attending the US meeting. - AFP