The Arab world is anxiously expecting action, rather than words, from US President Barack Obama, the former Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington has said. In an exclusive interview with the German Press Agency dpa, Prince Turki al-Faisal, who was ambassador to the US from 2005 until the end of 2006, praised the new US president for changing the tone of rhetoric from Washington regarding the Middle East, but now needed to make some concrete moves.
Obama is due to make a major speech in Cairo on June 4, in which he is expected to deal with the issue of the US' relationship - of late a troubled one - with the Muslim world. "Since Obama became president, he has said all the right things," Turki said. "What we need now is to see some action."
Obama spoke in Istanbul in April of "rebuilding a relationship between the United States and the people of the Muslim world," and expectations have hence risen of a new approach from the White House to Middle East conflicts than that of the Bush administration.
"The expectation," said Prince Turki said, "needs to be coupled with action on the ground." In particular, with Obama due to meet hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday, and then Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian head of state Hosny Mubarak by the end of May, the key question is the likelihood of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Netanyahu has said he is committed to peace-making but has not explicitly endorsed the two-state solution backed by Obama and most of the international community, something which could place him and Obama on a collision course. Turki confirmed Saudi Arabia's support for an independent Palestinian state living beside an Israeli one, but worried about whether that could, in view of the new government in Jerusalem, be achieved.
"If it will not be a two-state solution now it will inevitably be a one-state solution," he told dpa. "And from my point of view, a one state solution inevitably will mean an apartheid state where the Israelis will be the masters and the Palestinians will be the slaves," he said.
"And that would not be good, neither for the Israelis nor the rest of us." Prince Turki recalled the warning made by Jordan's King Abdullah II that the Middle East could descend into new war if an Arab-Israeli peace agreement had not been reached within 18 months.
The former ambassador said he was convinced that the hatred between Israelis and Palestinians could be overcome within a generation, and drew a parallel between that conflict and centuries of emnity between France and Germany - which were reversed in a few years after World War II. "But the precondition is equality and justice," he said.
Turki was for 25 years the head of Saudi Arabia's intelligence service, and also served as ambassador to London before his period in Washington. He now leads a research institute in Riyadh, and is seen as one of the most influential figures in the Saudi royal establishment.