France hopes to host Mideast talks in September

France still hopes to host a conference to re-launch the Middle East peace process, but has pushed the planned date back to September, Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told lawmakers on Tuesday. Juppe said he hoped the Middle East peace Quartet - the European Union, United Nations, Russia and United States - would next week urge Israel and the Palestinians to return to the negotiating table. "If this appeal is launched, we'll move on the second phase," Juppe told the French parliament's foreign affairs committee. "Do the parties agree to get around the table and where are we on an international conference?" Paris has suggested boosting a planned conference of donor states that fund the Palestinian Authority into a full political dialogue, with the Israeli government coming on board to discuss moving towards a final settlement. But the planned July date for such a conference is now seen as unrealistic, with traditional peace broker the United States appearing cold to the idea and Israel failing to show any enthusiasm for the French project. France has not given up, however, and Juppe said the donors' meeting may be possible in September and that Paris still hopes to turn it into a full international peace conference on the conflict. "It seems today that a conference of donors in the first fortnight of September would be a useful idea, because the Palestinian Authority needs funds," he told the parliamentarians. "Could this conference be the peace conference and negotiations that we envisaged? It's too soon to say," he said, adding: "You can see that we have not abandoned our initiative and that it has some chance of success." The Quartet is due to meet on July 11. Earlier, Juppe held a meeting with the Quartet's envoy to the Middle East peace process, Tony Blair, who gave cautious backing to the French plan, insisting it had not been rejected out of hand by Washington. "I think France is absolutely right to try to say to everyone that you can't leave a vacuum, and the French initiative is an attempt to fill that," he said in an interview with France 24 television. "Having just come from Washington and talked to the people there, I don't think they're cool towards it but what they obviously want to know is if it has got some chance of success," he explained. "And, in the end, the political negotiation will always be handled primarily by the Americans, but I think the French desire to have this negotiation renewed in a credible way is absolutely right," he added. Blair also confirmed there was no prospect of holding new talks before the end of July, as Juppe and French leader President Nicolas Sarkozy had envisioned when they intervened in the stalled peace process. "I don't think that will happen this month now, but we have to have a donors' conference at some point," he told France 24 when asked about the proposed meeting, which the Palestinians had cautiously welcomed. Asked if the idea could be revived soon, he said: "I hope so but I can't be sure, to be honest." Juppe said the Quartet will call for talks based on both sides renouncing terrorism and violence, accepting previous peace deals, agreeing that the negotiations be final, and recognising "two states for two peoples". "The parameters are the 1967 frontiers with mutually agreed land swaps with security guarantees, and, in a second phase, in the framework of a global deal, the question of refugees and the status of Jerusalem," he said. Previous generations of Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have agreed the rough outline of a peace "roadmap" but talks stalled over issues like Israeli settlement building and rocket attacks from Gaza.