WASHINGTON - Arab nations will give a new US-sponsored Middle East peace drive a chance, but are waiting for Israel to prove it is serious about ending the conflict, Arab League chief Amr Mussa said Wednesday.
"We want to give this opportunity a chance. We have some misgivings, but we are waiting to see what will happen in the next two months," Mussa told journalists here.
"During the next two months we will test the Israelis' intentions to see if they are serious, or if this is just another game."
He spoke as US President George W. Bush was meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas at the White House to formally launch new peace talks after a seven-year hiatus.
The two sides agreed at a major peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, on Tuesday to immediately resume talks in a bid to reach a final peace deal by the end of 2008 and lay to rest six decades of enmity.
Arab nations have remained skeptical about why this new US-championed drive for peace should succeed, where so many other attempts have failed.
But Mussa, who heads the 22-member Arab League -- most of whom do not have diplomatic relations with the Jewish state -- said Arab countries came to Annapolis "to support the Palestinians and put forward their point of view to the international community."
"All the representatives of the Arab countries which addressed the conference stressed they would not normalize ties with Israel for free.
"We are not just going to give Israel a net benefit. We are not prepared to give it a reward, for its policies" remain unacceptable, he added, highlighting calls for Israel to stop the settlements in the Palestinian territories.
And Mussa warned the Bush administration that it still had to prove its credentials to the Arab world, after virtually neglecting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since entering the White House in 2001.
"If the Americans want this process to succeed, they must stop playing the role of Israel's advocate and return to being an honest broker. For if they are Israel's advocate then they will run into" Arab refusal, Mussa warned.
But he said the joint Israeli-Palestinian document read out to the Annapolis conference on Tuesday by Bush had two positive elements: "the deadline for the negotiations should be November 2008, and that the mechanism would be followed by the United States."
He also welcomed future discussions on the Syrian and Lebanese tracks of the Arab-Israeli peace process, and "Russia's proposal to host follow-up talks in Moscow between February and April."
ms-jkb/ksh
11/28/2007 18:09 GMT