The importance of the visit by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, to France on Thursday and Friday to meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner lies in the timing.

The visit comes before Sarkozy takes part in the General Assembly of the United Nations on 12 September, and his meeting with the heads of the G-20 in Pittsburgh on the 24th and 25th of the same month.

It is true that the Pittsburgh meeting will be about treating the economic situation and the global financial system, but it will also touch on a fundamental political issue; Sarkozy described it to the foreign diplomatic corps “not a regional, but an international issue.” The French president told his Israeli friends, with his customary frankness, that “there is no peace with the continuation of settlements,” asking that they be stopped and frozen.

Sarkozy is trying to convince all the heads of Arab states that he meets to encourage the White House to launch an international conference, on all of the tracks, with European and American participation, before the end of the year. However, this French proposal is not a new one; whenever a new French president is elected, he tries to participate, alongside the US, in a Middle East peace conference.

Arab states are encouraging Europe’s participation, and particularly that of France, which has traditionally been less biased toward Israel. Even if the Sarkozy administration is closer than others to the Jewish state, France’s interests are tied to the Arab world.

The US administration rarely shows enthusiam in giving Europe a role in finding a solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, no matter how much Obama cooperates with allies. He prefers continuing negotiation between his envoy, George Mitchell, and the Palestinian and Israeli sides, before launching any international peace conference.

In fact, the Israeli government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, wants to buy time and stall by offering proposals that are not fooling the Palestinians. Netanyahu proposed a freeze on tenders for new settlements until 2010; it seems that he does not want to halt settlements, but is looking for ways to avoid a direct rejection of the demands by Mitchell and the Obama administration. It is clear that Israel does not want peace with the Palestinians and its Arab neighbors.

When the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, asked her Saudi counterpart, Prince Saud al-Faisal, about this request, he was surprised and said: “How can the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Arab sates undertake an initiative toward Israel when it is carrying out acts, which according to international law, are illegitimate?”

Even though President Obama is striving for real peace and wants a solution for this conflict, Israel’s dominance over the western world and its influence in the US make it a very difficult and complicated effort.

The French president, meanwhile, is always active and trying to accelerate the convening of an international conference and convince the main players, led by the White House, of the necessity of such a move. He will reiterate this to the Palestinian president, as he already did to the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, and the Jordanian monarch, King Abdullah II.

However, convening such a conference appears to be a difficult prospect before the end of the year, with Israel’s refusal to halt settlement and its rejection of the principle of peace with the Palestinians, as is clear from Israeli policies on the ground in Jerusalem and all Palestinian areas.