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Rice seeks support for long-dormant Arab plan for peace

US Secretary of State Condo-leezza Rice headed to the Middle East late on Friday hoping to rekindle a long-dormant Arab plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Beginning with her first stop in Egypt, Rice is set to engage in a rare effort at the kind of shuttle diplomacy once common in US peace efforts but which Rice has derided during her two years as Washington's top diplomat.

Her effort will focus in part on getting Arab nations more proactively involved in the peace efforts.

In the southern Egyptian city of Aswan, Rice will meet with leaders from Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, officials said.

She will then hold separate talks with Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas in the West Bank town of Ramallah and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in Jerusalem, before flying to Amman to meet King Abdullah II.

Rice then returns to Ramallah and Jerusalem for more discussions early next week -- her first such back-and-forth diplomacy between Arabs and Israelis.

In order to find a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she said earlier on Friday: "You need the energy and the help of moving forward on the Arab-Israel side, not at the end of the process, but earlier on the process."

"It's one thing to say `when there is a Palestinian state, we will be ready for Arab-Israeli reconciliation,'" she said.

But all parties also needed to determined "what can early stages of Arab-Israeli reconciliation do to help a Palestinian state," she said.

The shift in strategy reflects the difficulties facing the US in its peacemaking efforts since the Western-backed Abbas, joined a power-sharing government led by the radical Islamic movement Hamas.

In an initiative launched late last year, Rice hoped to strengthen the position of Abbas, then embroiled in a power struggle with Hamas, in part by brokering direct negotiations between him and Israel on the contours of a future Palestinian state.

But the process collapsed last month when Abbas agreed to cohabit in a unity government with Hamas in a bid to stanch deadly violence between his Fatah party and the Islamists.

Tensions over Hamas were underscored when Washington decided this week to slash around US$36 million of proposed aid to Palestinian security forces loyal to Abbas.

While Washington and its European allies took a softer line, agreeing to deal individually with Fatah members and independents in the new Palestinian Cabinet, they maintained a year-long boycott of the overall government.

As a result, her trip will focus in large part on reviving a peace plan unveiled by Saudi Arabia in 2002 but rejected by Israel and ignored by Washington, a senior US official said.

She said she hoped the Arab plan "would be offered again and offered in a way that suggests that there might be active follow-up to the initiative."

Under the plan, the Arab world would normalize ties with Israel in exchange for its withdrawal from all occupied Arab land.
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