Saudi Plan Now More Appealing To Israel
Olmert finds positive things to say about once-rejected proposal, but analysts doubt whether Arab states will modify it
Joshua Mitnick

Tel Aviv — As Israel flirted with Saudi Arabia’s five-year-old land-for-peace proposal that envisions normalized ties between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors, analysts said they doubted whether the Arab League would alter the plan sufficiently to allow Israel to fully accept it.

Even though he wants the Palestinian right of return expunged from the peace initiative, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week praised the “positive” elements of the Saudi plan, which was adopted in 2002 by the Arab League.

…Israel initially ignored the plan, which was adopted at the height of the second Palestinian uprising without any mention of combating terrorism. It called for Israel to return to its 1967 borders and establish east Jerusalem as the capital of a new Palestinian state.

A sign of the shifting fault lines in Middle East geopolitics, the resurfaced Saudi proposal highlights the growing confluence of interests between Israel and U.S.-allied Arab regimes.

This article appears in The Jewish Week, an extremely influential New York paper aimed at American Jews. The piece contains a lot of critical commentary, including from Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the US who has written extremely negatively about Saudi Arabia in the past. The overall tone of the article, though, is not negative. Instead, it’s suggesting that Israel can talk to the Arab world, with the help of Saudi Arabia, and that there’s a real opportunity to find resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian problem.