The Man Behind the Plan

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Crown Prince Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud has rounded up a few brothers, sons and friends for a weekend game of lawn bowling. Wearing a Bedouin robe and an incongruous pair of striped Adidas running shoes, the ruler--in fact if not in name--of Saudi Arabia hurls a ball down the turf and coaches a TIME correspondent in the finer points of the sport. "Be careful of the topography," he warns, using his palm to illustrate the hazards. "Even a slight grade can send the ball off course."

It is that type of wary caution that has typified Saudi rulers since the birth of the kingdom 70 years ago. Until recently, Abdullah was as careful as the rest. These days however, the Crown Prince seems to be disregarding his own advice, throwing the ball off course with deliberation.

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With a new Middle East peace initiative, he seems determined to play a more open and assertive role in regional affairs than any other Saudi leader has before him. At home, too, he appears to be coming into his own as a leader, advocating change, albeit slowly, in this most conservative of countries. During two days of meetings with TIME, which included rare visits to his private office, home and horse farm, Abdullah, 78, acknowledged many of Saudi Arabia's ills and discussed his plans for reform. "We have gone through shock and denial," says a Saudi official. "Now we're asking, 'Do we need to change?'"

Abdullah's leaking of a peace initiative to the New York Times was plainly part of a well-plotted charm campaign to improve Saudi Arabia's image in the light of its connections to Sept. 11. But the proposition has generated enormous attention worldwide, far exceeding the expectations of the Saudis themselves. Abdullah's offering is simple: he proposes that all the Arab countries state in advance that they will make peace with Israel if Israel relinquishes the lands it conquered in the 1967 war--that is, if it returns the Golan Heights to Syria and hands over the West Bank and Gaza Strip to the Palestinians. That equation, "land for peace," is as old as U.N. Resolution 242, passed in 1967, which the Saudis had already embraced by attending the 1991 Middle East peace conference in Madrid. But this is the first time the Saudis have explicitly defined "peace" as full normalization between Israel and all Arab states.

In the current environment, with the Israelis and Palestinians killing one another and no one so much as discussing a cease-fire, Abdullah's "statement of vision" was at least something. Last week the latest Palestinian suicide bomber killed nine Israelis in Jerusalem. Israeli army incursions into two Palestinian refugee camps left 20 Palestinians and two Israeli soldiers dead. Abdullah's initiative prompted the Bush Administration to dispatch CIA chief George Tenet and Middle East special envoy William Burns to Jiddah to take the matter up with the Crown Prince in person. The European Union's foreign policy chief Javier Solana made the same stop the day before. Every key Arab state except Syria has voiced support for Abdullah's "vision," making the Crown Prince confident he will win official backing at an Arab League summit later this month.

Even the Israelis could not entirely dismiss the initiative, despite the fact that its terms are unacceptable to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. To the Times, Abdullah spoke of "full withdrawal from all occupied territories...including in Jerusalem." Israel insists on keeping parts of the territories, and Sharon rejects any Israeli pullback in Jerusalem. The Saudis might be more flexible on these points than Abdullah indicated; Saudi officials now say the kingdom would endorse any border compromises acceptable to the Palestinians and Syrians. In any event, Sharon invited Abdullah to explain his ideas in detail. He insisted that before Israel would judge Abdullah's offering, Saudi Arabia and Israel must talk directly. (They never have.)

The Saudis insist on the opposite order; they aren't interested in talks unless Sharon endorses Abdullah's vision. In any event, the Saudis say they have nothing more to add. They have no interest in the laborious--and until now unsuccessful--work of hammering out details of a peace accord. "We are not in the real estate or zoning business," says the Crown Prince's foreign policy adviser Adel Jubeir. According to Arab diplomats, Abdullah has two immediate objectives. One is to lure the U.S. back into its old role as mediator between the Israelis and Palestinians, a function President Bush has largely abandoned. The second is to give Israelis hope in the peace process, so that they will throw Sharon out of office and elect a more moderate leader. That objective seemed somewhat farfetched; Abdullah's initiative created little popular enthusiasm in Israel.

For his part, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat publicly supported Abdullah, though a senior official of the Palestinian Authority says that privately Arafat worries that the Saudi initiative is just meaningless talk. The consensus within the Authority, this source notes, is that Abdullah was less interested in helping the Palestinians than in improving Saudi Arabia's image.