Word: abdullah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Abdullah's leaking of a peace initiative to the New York Times was plainly part of a well-plotted charm campaign to improve Saudi Arabia's image in the light of its connections to Sept. 11. But the proposition has generated enormous attention worldwide, far exceeding the expectations of the Saudis themselves. Abdullah's offering is simple: he proposes that all the Arab countries state in advance that they will make peace with Israel if Israel relinquishes the lands it conquered in the 1967 war--that is, if it returns the Golan Heights to Syria and hands over the West...
...current environment, with the Israelis and Palestinians killing one another and no one so much as discussing a cease-fire, Abdullah's "statement of vision" was at least something. Last week the latest Palestinian suicide bomber killed nine Israelis in Jerusalem. Israeli army incursions into two Palestinian refugee camps left 20 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers dead. Abdullah's initiative prompted the Bush Administration to dispatch CIA chief George Tenet and Middle East special envoy William Burns to Jiddah to take the matter up with the Crown Prince in person. The European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana made...
Even the Israelis could not entirely dismiss the initiative, despite the fact that its terms are unacceptable to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. To the Times, Abdullah spoke of "full withdrawal from all occupied territories...including in Jerusalem." Israel insists on keeping parts of the territories, and Sharon rejects any Israeli pullback in Jerusalem. The Saudis might be more flexible on these points than Abdullah indicated; Saudi officials now say the kingdom would endorse any border compromises acceptable to the Palestinians and Syrians. In any event, Sharon invited Abdullah to explain his ideas in detail. He insisted that before Israel would...
...Saudis insist on the opposite order; they aren't interested in talks unless Sharon endorses Abdullah's vision. In any event, the Saudis say they have nothing more to add. They have no interest in the laborious--and until now unsuccessful--work of hammering out details of a peace accord. "We are not in the real estate or zoning business," says the Crown Prince's foreign policy adviser Adel Jubeir. According to Arab diplomats, Abdullah has two immediate objectives. One is to lure the U.S. back into its old role as mediator between the Israelis and Palestinians, a function President...
...part, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat publicly supported Abdullah, though a senior official of the Palestinian Authority says that privately Arafat worries that the Saudi initiative is just meaningless talk. The consensus within the Authority, this source notes, is that Abdullah was less interested in helping the Palestinians than in improving Saudi Arabia's image...