Spain, France and Italy push Mid-East peace plan

Spain, France and Italy unveiled a five-point Middle East peace initiative today, calling Israeli-Palestinian violence intolerable and saying that Europe must take a lead role in ending the conflict.

Spanish prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero announced the plan at a summit with president Jacques Chirac of France. Italy is also on board, Zapatero said, and Spain hopes to win the endorsement of Britain and Germany and the broader European Union in the run-up to a December summit in Brussels.

“We cannot remain impassive in the face of the horror that continues to unfold before our eyes,” Zapatero told a news conference. The initiative largely overlaps with a package the Palestinians have offered to Israel.

Zapatero, asked if the initiative did not first need the support of Israel and the US, said it made sense for the three largest contributors to the expanded UN force in Lebanon to assert themselves for peace. “Someone has to take the first move,” he said.

The plan has five components: an immediate cease-fire, formation of a national unity government by the Palestinians that can gain international recognition, an exchange of prisoners – including the Israeli soldiers whose kidnapping sparked the war in Lebanon and fighting in Gaza this summer – talks between Israel’s prime minister and the Palestinian president and an international mission in Gaza to monitor a cease-fire.

Zapatero made no explicit reference in his comments to a need for Hamas to recognise Israel’s right to exist before the peace process gets underway.

The group’s steadfast refusal to recognise the Jewish state has been the main sticking point in efforts to resume aid to the cash-strapped Palestinian government.

There was no immediate reaction from Israel, the Palestinians or Washington to today’s announcement.

Italian prime minister Romano Prodi, speaking in Rome, described the plan as “a series of actions aimed at achieving concrete results in a situation where suffering has reached intolerable levels.”

Chirac said he hoped the EU – with particular input from foreign policy chief Javier Solana – would seek to “begin the political reforms necessary for the Middle East".

The Franco-Spanish summit came amid hopes in Europe for a greater voice in world affairs, particularly after midterm US elections in which voters punished President George W. Bush and gave control of Congress to the Democrats.

Many hope the results will usher in a more humble US foreign policy, in which Washington increasingly seeks the advice and input of its European allies.

Zapatero cited the Israeli shell blast that killed 19 people last week in a Palestinian village and the death this week of an Israeli woman in a Palestinian rocket attack.

The violence, he said, “has reached a level of deterioration that requires determined, urgent action by the international community".

The Palestinians are desperate to end a crippling aid boycott that the West imposed after Hamas won Palestinian elections and refused to rescind its call for Israel’s destruction.

Eventually, a major international conference on Mideast peace should be held, Zapatero said. Spain hosted a landmark peace conference in 1991 that laid the groundwork for the Oslo accords, which in turn led to the creation of the Palestinian Authority.

Mideast peace, Zapatero said, “is one of the factors that can contribute most to cornering fanaticism and terrorism".

Europe’s efforts to help broker a peace deal have hit some obstacles recently, and the continent could face problems this time as well. Many in Israel view European leaders as pro-Palestinian and are wary of their motives.

Last month, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, a leading European voice on the Middle East, said that the road map plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians was fatally stalled and that Europe should take the initiative to come up with a new plan.

Israeli and Palestinian officials were quick to reject his comments as overly pessimistic. Both sides insisted that the road map was not dead, just in serious need of a mechanism for implementation.

The US backed road map, devised in 2003, called for the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel but it never got off the ground because neither side lived up to even their initial commitments under the blueprint.