President Barack Obama risks triggering violence unless he follows through on his promises to promote Middle East peace, according to Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi ambassador to the US

Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize awarded two days ago is a call on the US president to step up efforts to facilitate a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Arabs by pressing Israel to make compromises, Turki, 64, said in an interview in Riyadh. “I hope that by the end of his term, he will have come to deserve it.”

“If he doesn’t take the bull by the horns on this issue, no one else will,” Turki said. “If he doesn’t, there will be more conflict, more bloodshed. It’s not going just to be confined to the West Bank and Gaza, as it has shown in the past 50 years, it has gone beyond the borders of the Middle East.”

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter and a leading Arab power, has shown frustration at the failure of successive US administrations to broker peace in the Middle East. A few months before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, now king, in a letter to then US President George W. Bush demanded a more active US peacemaking role.

“These things tend to take on a dynamic of their own,” Turki, whose brother Prince Saud al-Faisal is the kingdom’s foreign minister, said in an interview in his office in the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, which he heads. “Things have to be shown to be done quickly for people to maintain their confidence that something will be done.”

The Obama administration has asked Israel to halt all construction activity in the West Bank to advance the peace process and Palestinians have said they won’t negotiate unless Israel does so. There are almost 300,000 Israelis living in 121 settlements in the West Bank, where Palestinians want to create a state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to agree to a total building freeze, saying construction must continue in existing Jewish communities in the West Bank to meet the needs of natural growth. Netanyahu has also said his government wouldn’t agree to any division of Jerusalem. Palestinians have said that in any final agreement, Israel must cede the eastern half of the city to serve as the capital of a Palestinian state.

“It is Israel that is doing things on the ground, changing the status quo, reneging on previous promises,” said Turki.

“Whatever pressure that has to be put, it has to be put on the party that is doing all these things, contrary to previous agreements and commitments.”

The former Saudi envoy, son of the late King Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, is a graduate of Georgetown University. He was the kingdom’s longest-serving intelligence chief, holding the position for 25 years and was also ambassador to the UK.

A peace initiative put forward by King Abdullah in 2002 which proposed normalization between Israel and Arab states in exchange for a full Israeli withdrawal from land conquered in the 1967 Middle East war, remains “the only game in town,” said the Saudi royal.  (Bloomberg)