Saudi Asks Israel to Abandon Barrier as a Gesture to Arabs

By HELENE COOPER - Sept 27, 2007

Israel should stop work on a security barrier in and along the West Bank and halt settlement activity there as a good-will gesture to assure Arab states that it is serious about comprehensive peace talks, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said yesterday.

The minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, stopped short of making his demand a condition for Arab attendance at a planned Middle East peace conference. And he said that in recent days, he had become encouraged about the prospects for the conference, which the United States is to sponsor in November. But he would not promise that Saudi Arabia would attend, a major Israeli objective.

His comments, after a meeting between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and top officials from the gulf Arab states on the outskirts of the United Nations General Assembly here, forecast the tough road ahead for the Bush administration in trying to forge a comprehensive Middle East peace in the last months of President Bush’s term.

Saudi Arabia and America’s other Arab allies have insisted that the conference tackle the so-called final status issues that have bedeviled negotiators since 1979. They include the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees who fled their homes or were forced out, the dismantling of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the borders of an eventual Palestinian state.

Bush administration officials say that they are also pushing Israel hard to put the big issues on the table, but acknowledge that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel needs something in return: Arab, and especially Saudi, diplomatic recognition of Israel.

During a briefing for reporters yesterday, Prince Saud raised another potentially sticky issue for the Bush administration as it seeks progress on a peace proposal: the Islamic group Hamas, which the United States and Israel view as a terrorist organization but which controls Gaza, home to 1.4 million Palestinians.

After Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, kicked Hamas out of the national unity government that Hamas formed in February with Mr. Abbas’s Fatah party. The ejection was applauded by the United States and Israel, which have refused to deal with Hamas.

But Prince Saud said that for any peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians to work, Hamas must be brought into another national unity government with Fatah. He said that if the international community had accepted the Palestinian national unity government in February, when Saudi Arabia brokered an accord establishing the government, Hamas might have eventually renounced violence against Israel. He called that “water under the bridge now,” but added that Saudi Arabia still wanted to establish another national unity government between Hamas and Fatah.

“You have to,” he said. “Peace can not be made by one man or by half a people.”

But compromise on Hamas is not likely from the Bush administration, which has characterized the battle against the group as a fight between moderates and extremists.

The Middle East peace conference has dominated the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing in meetings on the outskirts of the General Assembly. President Bush, by publicly announcing the peace conference two months ago, gave high-level attention to an issue that critics said his administration had ignored for six years.

But now, some analysts say, that attention has raised expectations, putting the administration in the position of having to produce something tangible.

“Failure is not an option,” Ms. Rice told Arab officials at a meeting this week, quoting a line from “Apollo 13,” one of her favorite movies.

Prince Saud repeated that line at his briefing with reporters. He also said that the conference would be pointless if Syria did not attend. Ms. Rice said earlier that the United States planned to invite Syria.

“You know the old saying,” Prince Saud joked, “that there can be no war without Egypt and no peace without Syria.”