Top PA official: French FM will visit Ramallah in April

France’s recently installed Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault will visit Ramallah in April to assess responses to an initiative launched by his predecessor, Laurent Fabius, to hold an international peace conference, Turkish news agency Anadolu quoted Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki as saying Friday.

Malki announced Ayrault’s upcoming visit at the conclusion of a trip to Brussels, where he met with European officials including Belgian Foreign Minister Didier Reynders.

“The French Initiative constituted a major part of this meeting with members of the EU Committee on Foreign Affairs,” Malki said.

When Fabius announced the initiative for a peace conference hopefully followed by substantive peace negotiations, he said France would recognize a Palestinian state if the initiative failed, angering Jerusalem, where Israeli officials said the ultimatum put forward by Fabius served as an incentive to the Palestinians to ensure effort failed.

The United States also reacted coolly to the French idea, seeing it as an attempt to steal its role as chief mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Earlier this month, however, Ayrault, who assumed his role in mid-February, backtracked from the ultimatum. Ayrault said: “Nothing is ever automatic. France takes this initiative and is going to present it to its partners, so it’s a first step. There is no precondition.”

“What we want, that’s our commitment, is to relaunch a political process of negotiation, to revive a peace process and that’s our priority,” Ayrault said. “So we’ll do everything to create a favorable climate to revive the process.”