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.
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