AMMAN: The foreign ministers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will visit Jordan this week for talks with King Abdullah II on reviving the Middle East peace process, the government spokesman said on Monday. The Saudi and Egyptian foreign ministers will visit Jordan on Wednesday as part of the ongoing consultations and stepped up efforts to revive the peace process, Nasser Jawdeh told a weekly news conference. There is a lot of interest that is shared by all concerned in this region to move the peace process forward, to bring the parties back to the negotiating table, to make progress on that front, Jawdeh said. There is a window of opportunity and we will have to use it, he said. We cannot but be optimistic. There is a lot of movement, there is a lot of traction on the ground.
The visits by Egypt s Ahmed Abul Gheit and Saud al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia are the latest in a flurry of diplomatic activity ahead of an Arab summit in Riyadh on March 28-29 due to focus on Arab-Israeli peace, Iraq and Lebanon. Israel is hoping the summit will tackle a 2002 Saudi peace initiative that calls for normalization of ties in exchange for an Israeli pullout from Arab land occupied in 1967 and the establishment of a Palestinian state. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said on Monday the peace plan contained some good points, but needed work. Last week the Jordanian monarch told a joint session of the US Congress in Washington that the United States had a key role to play to help achieve a lasting Middle East peace and must take risks to secure that goal.
