Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert expressed his country's readiness yesterday to discuss an Arab peace initiative and find ways to implement such a plan.
Olmert said after arriving for talks with Jordan's King Abdullah II that Israel was "ready to sit down and talk about it carefully" and was willing to listen to Arab views.
"We heard about the Arab peace initiative and we say come and present it to us. You want to talk to us about it, we are ready to sit down and talk about it carefully," he told reporters in this ancient city.
Describing the plan as "very interesting," Olmert said "we are ready to cooperate to find the appropriate manner to implement. If the Arab countries want to present their peace initiative, we will be more than happy to sit down and listen carefully."
Olmert invited the "22 leaders of the Arab nations that are ready to make that kind of peace with Israel, to come to Israel, where ever they want and to sit down with us and start talk and present their ideas."
He said that if they were willing to invite him somewhere for talks, then "I'm ready to come."
Olmert arrived in Petra yesterday for a rare high-level meeting with Abdullah on the sidelines of a conference involving Nobel Laureates and Israeli and Arab youth on ways to solve conflicts in the Mideast.
"We are ready to come and to invite" Arab leaders "without preconditions from us or their side," he told reporters.
Jordan, along with Egypt, were the first Arab countries to make peace with Israel and are charged with promoting the Arab-initiated peace deal to the Jewish State, which has welcomed it as a good starting point but objects to several key provisions.
"The peace process is frozen, but what we are looking for is seeing a real serious step from the Israeli side to sit at the table to negotiate what the roads map and the Arab peace initiative are calling for," Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeneh said.
Ahead of Olmert's meeting with Abdullah, his spokeswoman Miri Eisin said the two leaders planned to break away from the conference and travel to the king's palace in the southern Jordanian resort of Aqaba for their talks.
Abdullah regards the Arab peace plan as a historic chance and will make it the focus of his talks with Olmert.
The Arab peace plan offers Israel full recognition in exchange for a full withdrawal from lands it captured in the 1967 Middle East war and the creation of a Palestinian state. Israel has welcomed the plan as a good starting point for negotiations but has objected to several key provisions.
The conference in Petra, a city carved into rose-red stone and built by the Nabataean culture some 2,000 years ago, is hosted jointly by the King Abdullah II Fund for Development and the New York-based Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion