Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh attend the Arab League summit in Saudi Arabia last month. (Maan Images)

The Arab peace initiative has been widely misunderstood, and occasionally even deliberately misconstrued.

The initiative is not a road map providing a step-by-step approach to an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, nor does it demand of Israel prior acceptance of certain Arab or Palestinian conditions.

It does not provide a framework for peace negotiations other than what is already specified in the road map that Israel claims it fully supports: Israel's return to the pre-1967 armistice line as the basis for negotiations for alterations, if any, to that line; the location of a capital of a Palestinian state in East Jerusalem; and a resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Negotiations over these three principal permanent-status issues are not a condition dreamed up by the Saudis or the Arab League. They are the universally accepted ground rules for peace negotiations that even President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have stated categorically Israel cannot alter on its own.

The specific terms of a peace agreement are essentially left by the Arab initiative to the parties themselves. Whatever terms enable the parties to close the deal will be acceptable to the initiative's sponsors. Their concern is less that Palestinians will be too generous to Israel than that they will be too inflexible.

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Arab leaders therefore see Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's request for a meeting to "clarify" the Arab initiative as his way of obtaining normalization with all Arab countries without doing anything for the Palestinians in return.

That their skepticism is not misplaced was confirmed by Olmert's boast in one of his pre-Passover interviews in Israeli newspapers that if he were to succeed in his demand for a meeting with Arab leaders, Israel would already have gained a significant measure of recognition from all Arab countries. That is why the Arab League has turned Olmert down.

Israel's acceptance of the Arab League peace initiative would not limit its ability to protect its vital interests in negotiations with the Palestinians.

Saudi officials confirmed in 2002 that their peace initiative does not preclude minor territorial adjustments, by mutual consent, on both sides of the pre-1967 border for security reasons and to enable Israel to incorporate large concentrations of population in the settlements that adjoin the former Green Line. This would entail no more than about 2 percent of Palestine in exchange for comparable territory on Israel's side of the border.

To read the full article please visit the International Herald Tribune's website.