http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/914876.html

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Friday he would tell Prime Minister Ehud Olmert next week that now is the time to make peace with the Palestinians.

Olmert was planning to visit Paris on Monday, and Sarkozy said he would make the same case as the one he made to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas last month in New York.

“My message to Mr. Olmert will simply be that… time has come to make peace,” Sarkozy told a news conference after an EU summit in Lisbon. “Now is the time to take risks and build a lasting peace.”

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said Thursday that decisions reached at the upcoming U.S.-sponsored Mideast peace conference should be brought before the UN Security Council for approval.

Ban made these remarks during a meeting with Meretz Chairman Yossi Beilin in New York, and added that he hopes that Syria will send a delegation to the summit. He said that he was pleased U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed her intention to invite Syria to the conference as part of the Arab League monitoring team.

Tensions between Israel and Syria have escalated over recent months, and Syrian President Bashar Assad has said that his country would refuse to attend the summit unless Syrian concerns were on the agenda, referring to the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Beilin told Ban during their New York meeting that the chances for this summit to succeed rely primarily on the Palestinians’, Israelis’ and Americans’ understanding of what the possible repercussions would be should the summit fail.

The conference is scheduled to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, later this year.

On Friday, the Palestinian and Israeli negotiating teams met in Jerusalem to coordinate their stance ahead of the regional peace summit scheduled to take place in Annapolis, Maryland later this year, Army Radio reported.

Israel’s chief negotiator, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, met privately on Thursday with the Palestinian negotiator heading the current talks, former Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia.

Sources told Haaretz that the closed talks were successful, and that the two sides are progressing in their negotiations over a joint agreement to present at the summit.

Palestinian officials denied reports of a crisis in the negotiations, saying that the talks were still in their preliminary stages and that it was as yet too early to report any rifts between the two sides.

Qureia on Thursday dismissed claims that peace momentum has stalled, saying Israel and the Palestinians still have their sights set on framing a shared vision of peace.

“There is no crisis at all, said Ahmed Qureia, playing down Palestinian

accusations that Israel has been undermining preparations for the upcoming U.S.-brokered peace summit.”

The Palestinian Authority’s general chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said Thursday that Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have until the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions next summer to complete their talks.

The first stage begins now, he said, the period before the peace summit scheduled for next month in Annapolis, Maryland. The second stage would be the negotiations on a peace deal, and the final phase would be the implementation of the treaty.

“We have to reach a joint document, and not a peace treaty, on the core issues with specific parameters for solving these issues before convening the conference,” Erekat said.