'Obama to urge Muslim world to recognize Israel'

[IndianaGreen]

Last update - 05:33 11/05/2009

'Obama to urge Muslim world to recognize Israel'

By Reuters

The United States is promoting a peace plan for the Middle East involving a "57-state solution" in which the entire Muslim world would recognize Israel, Monday's Times of London quoted Jordan's King Abdullah as saying.

"We are offering a third of the world to meet them with open arms," the king said. "The future is not the Jordan River or the Golan Heights or the Sinai, the future is Morocco in the Atlantic and Indonesia in the Pacific. That is the prize."

But he warned: "If we delay our peace negotiations, then there is going to be another conflict between Arabs or Muslims and Israel in the next 12-18 months."

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The Times said that, after Obama's meeting with Netanyahu in Washington on May 18, the peace initiative could form the centrepiece of his major address to the Muslim world in Egypt on June 4.

"The critical juncture will be what comes out of the Obama-Netanyahu meeting," Abdullah said.

"If there is procrastination by Israel on the two-state solution or there is no clear American vision for how this is going to play out in 2009, then all the tremendous credibility that Obama has worldwide and in this region will evaporate overnight if nothing comes out in May."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084660.html

May 11, 2009

Netanyahu meeting with Obama decides Mid-East’s future, says Abdullah

President Obama’s critical meeting with Binyamin Netanyahu next week has become the acid test for the Administration’s commitment to peace in the Middle East, King Abdullah of Jordan said yesterday.

The monarch does not conceal his feelings about the Israeli leader. He described their last encounter – 10 years ago when he had just come to the throne – as the “least pleasant” of his reign. But he, and President Mubarak of Egypt, are expected to meet the Israeli leader before his trip to Washington, where the future course of the region could be decided.

The King said that he was prepared to believe what Israelis have told him — that a right-wing Government in Israel is better able to deliver peace than the Left.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6261925.ece