Ambassadors on Thursday called on Israel to accept the 2002 Arab Peace Plan, as the best path forward to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Egypt still believes that reaching a peace agreement is achievable,” Egypt Ambassador to Israel Hazem Khairat said in a rare public address to the Israeli public which he delivered at the 2016 Herzliya Conference.
He pledged that his country would continue to work for a just peace that restores security to the region. This includes “activating the Arab Peace Initiative,” Khairat said.
The Arab Peace Plan, also known as the Saudi Initiative, offers Israel normalized ties with the Arab world in exchange for a withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines and a solution to the Palestinian refugees.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the last month has called for a regional peace process based on a revised version of the initiative. He has said that those revisions should take into account the upheavals and changes to the region in the last 14 years, but has not laid out his vision of what those revisions should entail.