SAUDI ARABIA WILL ONLY TALK TO ISRAEL IF IT AGREES TO COMMIT SUICIDE

Saudi Arabia Says It May Meet Israel (Der Speigel)
JERUSALEM, Aug. 1 — Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said Wednesday that his country would consider attending President Bush’s planned Israeli-Palestinian peace conference in the fall, which would put Saudi officials publicly at the same table as their Israeli counterparts for the first time since 1991.

But Saudi officials said a precondition of its attendance was that the conference tackle the four big “final status” issues that had bedeviled peace negotiators since 1979: the fate of Palestinian refugees who fled or were forced to flee their homes in Israel, mostly before or during the 1948 war; the status of Jerusalem; the borders of a Palestinian state; and the dismantlement of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“We are interested in a peace conference that deals with the substance of peace, not just form,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said at a news conference in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “If it does so, it would be of great interest to Saudi Arabia.”

The Israeli foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, said later on Wednesday during meetings with Ms. Rice, who flew to Jerusalem after the talks with the Saudis in Jidda, that Israel welcomed the Saudi comments. But in a sign that the Saudi precondition may not be so easy to meet, she added that sometimes “it’s not wise to put the most sensitive issues out first.”