Mideast Takes Center Stage at Paris Summit

French President Nicolas Sarkozy (center) welcomes Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (left) and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to Paris, prior to the founding summit of the Union for the Mediterranean. Getty Images

Paris
While the French-initiated summit for the Union for the Mediterranean didn't produce any major breakthroughs, French President Nicolas Sarkozy recognized one achievement: every Arab country except Libya sitting down with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

"The fact that we were all in the same room is already a lot," Sarkozy said at a news conference Sunday in the French capital following the inaugural summit.

Participants approved six projects and signed an accord which, among other things, talks of developing peace and fighting terror. All 43 nations also signed on to support the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Sarkozy underlined that much work still needed to be done to implement the projects.

Peace between Israel, Syria and the Palestinian Authority was a major focus of the event.

On Sunday, Sarkozy hosted a meeting of Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and a day earlier, Syrian President Bashar Assad met with Sarkozy and the new president of Lebanon, Michel Suleiman, to discuss peace in the region.

Olmert spoke about his morning discussion with Abbas.

"It seems to me that we have never been closer to the possibility of a peace accord than we are today," Olmert told reporters.

"We are living through an essential and critical moment," he said, evoking the "very serious negotiations" currently under way.

Abbas said at the news conference that "it is in all of our interests to reach [peace]. We should achieve peace for the people of the Middle East in general, but also for peace in the world."

Hide, but don't seek: Syria's President Bashar Assad passes behind Israeli President Ehud Olmert as he arrives for a working session of the summit. RNS Photo/Reuters

The summit, which aimed to normalize Israel's relationship with its Mediterranean Arab neighbors through shared economic and cultural projects, was considered risky due to the huge differences among the participating nations.

Referring to critics who questioned the feasibility of the French-initiated project, Sarkozy asked in his opening remarks Sunday: "Who can live without taking risks?"

He added that "the very idea of life is that: to take risks. The risk we are taking in Europe is to extend a hand of friendship to [Egyptian] President [Hosni] Mubarak and to invite Prime Minister Olmert as a friend. If the risk we are taking is just that, extending a hand of friendship, and trying to construct peace, then it would have been an even greater risk not to have taken that risk."

At the conference, Assad sat opposite Olmert at a large, circular table set in alphabetical order so the disputing countries were not placed side by side. The leaders did not meet one on one, nor did they shake hands.

Afterward, Sarkozy dismissed rumors that Assad stepped out before Olmert's closed-door speech to member states, insisting that the event went off "without an incident."

But according to several diplomats and participants, Assad and Abbas left for meetings on the sidelines of the summit. Assad reportedly met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Israeli officials confirmed Monday that Assad snubbed Olmert, just hours after the prime minister sent the Syrian leader a message pleading for direct talks between their nations before a new American administration takes office in January and insisting on his "serious" desire for peace.

The officials, who could not be named due to the sensitivity of the issue, said in an interview that "Olmert sat through and listened to everything Assad said, but Assad left when Olmert spoke."

The officials were citing Israeli officials in the conference room at the time.

Assad and Arab statesmen also refused to be photographed in a group picture with Olmert.

A Reuters photographer captured a photo of Olmert apparently trying to catch Assad's attention while Assad blocks his face with his hand to avoid eye contact.

Assad also reportedly tried to avoid being photographed with Olmert during Monday's Bastille Day national holiday, where Union for the Mediterranean participants were invited to watch the annual parade down the Champs-élysées.

At a news conference on Saturday, Sarkozy told reporters that he asked the Syrian leader to "bring him proof" that Iran was not planning to build nuclear weapons. The next day, Sarkozy told journalists that during his meeting with Assad, he discussed the Syrian leader's potential contribution to the freeing of Israeli kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit, who is also a French citizen, held captive by Hamas since 2006. Assad is in a position to speak to Hamas on the subject because of Syria's close ties to the group.

All participants were invited to the Bastille Day events, which at first incited an outcry from human-rights activists, who criticized Assad's presence.

Sarkozy noted that the participants had adopted six projects that involve cleaning up the Mediterranean Sea, as well as creating maritime and land highways, civil-protection programs, solar-energy laboratories, a Euro-Mediterranean university and a business-development initiative for the region.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told French radio Europe 1 on Monday, however, that the accord needed to be amended due to an Israeli and Palestinian disagreement. Kouchner said that the conflict was over the definition of Israel as a Jewish homeland, and whether it should be called a "nation-state, a national and democratic state."

"National implies a whole difficulty around the return of refugees to a state that is Jewish or not from a Palestinian state," he said.

The Palestinian foreign minister, Riyad Al-Maliki, told the AFP news agency that "Israel insisted on including the mention of a 'state for the Jewish people,' to which we are categorically opposed."

Said Al-Maliki: "We would have liked the final declaration on this point to be more clear."