Jordan's king calls for Mid-East talks

King Abdullah backed calls for international monitors

By Bridget Kendall in Amman

King Abdullah of Jordan has said it is of paramount importance that the Israelis and the Palestinians get past the current crisis of violence and back to the negotiating table.

Speaking in an interview with the BBC, the king said the situation had to be resolved before it got out of hand.

King Abdullah described the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as a Pandora's box, a spiral of violence that could always spill over from being an Israeli-Palestinian dispute and become a wider Israeli-Arab conflict.

But he said he believed there was little hope of the conflict subsiding on its own, the animosity was too deep-rooted.

International monitors

Instead, the outside world had to find a way to get the two sides to disengage and start talking again and the most positive idea at the moment was the call for international monitors.

King Abdullah warned of a widening conflict

King Abdullah also said he understood the current American reluctance to get closely involved.

He said the Bush administration felt both the Israelis and Palestinians had taken the previous Clinton administration for granted and played each other off against the United States.

Now the US felt it would be taken advantage of again and did not want to play the American presidential card too soon.

Damage to Jordan

As for Jordan itself, King Abdullah admitted the collapse of the peace process and turmoil next door had been damaging.

This year numbers of western tourists to Jordan are down by 40%, though a rise in Arab visitors has helped ease the problem.

But he denied he was under pressure from Jordan's large Palestinian population to break off Jordan's peace treaty with Israel.

He said even the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, saw it as an asset to have Arab leaders in Jordan and Egypt who could intervene with the Israelis in a crisis.

However, if the violence did escalate, he said Jordan had made it clear it would not stand for another Palestinian exodus.

Physically Jordan did not have the water resources to sustain any more citizens, and in any case, he said, it would weaken the Palestinian call for an independent state.