The 22-member Arab League has sent the Egyptian and Jordanian ministers to try to do the impossible and persuade Israel to accept the Arab peace initiative.



The plan was revised and re-adopted at a summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia last March.

It offers Israel everything it should want, if it wanted peace, including the normalisation of ties with Arab nations in exchange for full withdrawal from Arab land occupied during the 1967 War, the creation of a Palestinian state and the return of refugees.

But Israel does not want peace -it wants Palestinian land - wants more, as usual, and as Peres said last week he wanted a foot on both banks of the Jordan river and probably the Latini as well.

Rula Amin, Al Jazeera's corespondent in the West Bank, said "This peace process has been going on for almost 13 years and people are sick and tired of hearing about meetings and negotiations and conferences without seeing concrete results."

Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, reported on Wednesday that Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, was proposing endless talks with the Palestinians about "an agreement of principles but no Jerusalem, borders or return."

Officials have said that Olmert was ready to start discussions in "good wide general terms as long as they are about nothing" with the Palestinian president.

But they made clear it was premature to start detailed "final-status" negotiations.