His Majesty King Abdullah II’s interview with Suleiman Khalidi on Reuters

"Jordan's King warns Palestinian statehood at risk"

Jordan's King Abdullah warned feuding Palestinians on Wednesday that their hopes of statehood could be permanently wrecked within months unless they step back from the brink of civil war.

Palestinians had to put aside internal differences and face other challenges, he said, citing what he described as a growing right-wing camp in Israel pursuing an uncompromising "fortress Israel" mindset rather than "integration in the region".

A power struggle between Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction that triggered the worst internal fighting in a decade last week could be exploited by Israel and worsen the Palestinians' plight, the monarch said.

"All of us have to work to reach out to our Palestinian brothers and get them to take a step back and see that this is not the time for infighting," King Abdullah told Reuters in an interview at the royal palace in Amman.

"A lot is at stake today and if we fail now, we risk pushing Palestinian aspirations so far behind that it will take a long time to bring us back to where we want to be, and in the process, risk the future of Palestine," the monarch added.

King Abdullah said time was fast running out to forge an Arab-Israel peace based on two states, Israel and Palestine.

"I really think that by the first half of 2007 we might wake up to the reality and realise that the two-state solution is no longer attainable, and then what?," he said.

Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians broke down in 2000, helping trigger a Palestinian uprising. Prospects of new talks dwindled after the militant Hamas group beat Fatah in Palestinian parliamentary elections earlier this year.

In the meantime, Israel had seized the upper hand, he said.

"My view of a two state solution is a viable Palestinian state, and this is becoming more and more blurred for me. It was much more concrete, recently," the monarch said.

WEST BANK BORDERS

Jordan, which hosts the largest number of Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza, is worried Jewish settlement and expropriation of land will leave Israel with substantial parts of the territory it seized in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

"I think we are really running out of time. Physically on the ground and geographically, I think there is less and less of a West Bank and Jerusalem to talk about," said Abdullah.

"...We want to go back to the 1967 borders. We are talking about that today. Are we going to talk about that tomorrow though? This is the danger," he said.

Rising Iranian influence and the spread of Islamic fundamentalism had also brought more regional instability that dimmed peace prospects even further, he said.

"A few years back one could reasonably predict what was happening. Now it's much more difficult to read the map. There are so many more players," he said.

Abdullah said a peace plan drawn by Arab states including Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, envisaged speeding up a 2003 US-sponsored roadmap for peace and offered a "window of opportunity to resolve the core Middle East conflict".

"If we don't engage the Israelis today what will the landscape be two years from now?" he said.

The Arab peace plan also envisages Arab moderates for the first time assisting in the negotiating process and helping the Palestinians seek better terms from Israel, the monarch said.

"The Arabs have to step in. They need to be close to the negotiating table when the Israelis and Palestinians sit," he said. "There is a great opportunity (in the plan) but there is a great danger of missing it ... especially if civil war happens."