A comprehensive package to settle several Middle East crises is now more urgently needed than at any time over the past 60 years, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has said.
Speaking in Riyadh last night, Mr Ahern told an audience of leading figures in Saudi politics and business that the Middle East is "the biggest single threat to world peace".
Military or unilateral solutions cannot provide lasting solutions, as clearly evidenced by the outcome of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon last year, and ongoing violence in Palestine.
"Following another terrible year of diminishing hopes, the Israeli and the Palestinian people know this truth in their hearts better than anyone else," he told the King Faisal Foundation.
"The question of Palestine is not, of course, the sole or even the primary cause of all the inter-related problems of the Middle East, but it affects every one of them, to a greater or lesser extent. Its resolution is not only an historic and moral imperative, it would transform the prospects for the whole region," he said.
He urged both Israelis and Palestinians to follow the "crystal clear" road map set out by the United Nations, the US, the EU and Russia.
Mr Ahern paid tribute to King Abdullah for spearheading the Arab League's 2002 declaration that member states would agree to make peace with and recognise Israel if it withdrew completely from the occupied territories, accepted a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital, and agreed to a just settlement for Palestinian refugees. Describing the declaration as "historic", Mr Ahern said it represented "a remarkable political move by the Arab states which cannot be ignored".
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's recent statement that he is now ready to explore the declaration is "significant", said the Taoiseach.
"It would surely strengthen the position of the Palestinian people in seeking to achieve their rights if the Hamas government in Palestine were now to demonstrate the courage and the self-confidence to explicitly accept and support the Arab initiative, rather than waiting for others to present new formulations of the same terms for a settlement."
Having won the last Palestinian election, Hamas, he said, must now "complete the transition from violence to politics; accept the logic of the process it has entered and commit to the negotiation of a two-state solution. Nobody has argued that Hamas won the elections because the Palestinian people opposed a two-state solution.
"The victory was the product of domestic politics and of frustration at the failure of the peace process to deliver."
The Palestinian people, he said, "know well from the history of the past 60 years that there are those who are ready to exploit their suffering for their own political purposes, domestically, regionally and internationally."
Armed conflict between Hamas and other Palestinian groups will serve the interests of no one "other than those intent on spreading chaos, distrust and hate across the region. It will drive Israelis and Palestinians further apart. It will render a viable political settlement more difficult to attain, and impossible to sustain. Just as it is a fantasy for Hamas to pretend that there is any alternative to a negotiated two-state solution, it would surely be equally a fantasy to believe that the views and interests of Hamas and their supporters can be set aside or bypassed."
The Taoiseach added: "Whole communities are labelled as moderate or extreme, those with whom the international community can engage, and those with whom it cannot. The truth, of course, is that this is a historically vibrant region of different peoples - the cultural wellspring of so much which we in Europe value today."