Tony Blair said yesterday that he expected the Middle East peace process to find "a way forward" in the next few weeks.In a rare return to Westminster, the former prime minister said the month of June would be "critical" to efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mr. Blair, now Middle East envoy for the Quartet of the United Nations, United States, European Union and Russia, was giving evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.
He claimed success in assisting development in the Palestinian territories since taking up his role in summer 2007, but suggested the recent political situation had been an obstacle.
He expressed hope, however, that the commitment to peace from President Barack Obama, the Israeli government and the Arab world could bear fruit.
"I think the desire at the present time frankly is to see if we can get this going again," he told MPs.
"I think June will be a very critical month in this whole business."
Mr. Blair predicted that Mr. Obama would use a speech in Egypt on Thursday to signal the extent of the new American administration's "serious undertaking" in the Middle East.
He said other discussions were also taking place.
"I think at some point over the next few weeks there will emerge a way forward for this," he said.
"There is a lot of thinking that will be done by the Israeli government internally, by the Arab world, by ourselves as a quartet and the American administration, and I think people want to see is there a positive way forward we can achieve here."
Mr. Blair said peace in Israel and the Palestinian territories help improve stability in the wider region, such as Syria and Lebanon, but also in relation to the current Iranian regime.
"If instead of a dynamic that moves towards conflict you have a dynamic that moves towards peace, it gets harder for anyone, in this case the Iranian leadership, to impose a sense of conflict or inevitability of conflict on the region," he said.
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