Arab League chief Amr Moussa, responding to the US campaign for democracy in the Middle East, said on Tuesday the priority should be an even-handed US policy towards the Arab-Israeli conflict.
"If there is a need for democracy and development, there is also a need to deal with the greater danger related to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the blank cheque given to Israel to do what it likes with the Palestinians," he said.
"The Arab world wants to see some honesty in dealing with the Palestinian issue so that it can believe that any initiatives proposed do not spring from blind bias towards Israel," Moussa told reporters.
The administration of US President George W. Bush has made democracy in the Arab world the centrepiece of its Middle East policy, while withdrawing from Washington's traditional role as mediator between Israelis and Palestinians.
Arab diplomats say they believe the US campaign is largely an attempt by Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq last year, now that US forces have failed to find the weapons of mass destruction on which the invasion was originally based.
Moussa, an outspoken critic of US policy, said Arabs did not reject calls for democracy and human rights.
"How can we talk about an initiative for the greater, smaller or medium-sized Middle East without dealing frankly with the Israeli occupation of Arab land in Palestine and Syria?" the secretary-general added.
The United States has prepared a working paper on its Greater Middle East Initiative for presentation to a Group of Eight summit in the US state of Georgia in June.
According to a draft of the paper, published by the London-based Arabic newspaper al-Hayat last week, the initiative says nothing about the Arab-Israeli conflict or the occupation of Iraq by US and other foreign forces.
The paper proposes that the rich industrialised countries support change in the Middle East by financing projects to promote free elections, independent media, civil society organisations, and modern education systems.
The paper bases its analysis of conditions in the region on two controversial UN Arab Human Development Reports, which share with the Bush administration the view that the Arab world's problems are mainly internal.
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