A bipartisan group of eightformer top U.S. policy-makers sent a letter to President George W. Bush Wednesday, urging him to make sure that Arab states that do not currently recognize Israel will nevertheless participate in next month's Israeli-Palestinian conference.

The conference, which is scheduled to begin Nov. 15 in Annapolis, Md., should establish and endorse the contours of a permanent peace accord, according to the policy-makers.

Their letter also urged Bush to use the conference to launch Israeli-Syrian peace talks and lay the groundwork for a ceasefire between Israel and Gaza, the first step toward engaging Hamas, which controlsGaza, in the larger peace effort. The letter was signed by the national security advisers to former U.S. national security advisers, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, among others.

In order to be credible to Arab participants, the conference, must commit itself to a freeze on all settlement expansion, according to the letter, which was also signed by former Rep. Lee Hamilton, co-chair with former Secretary of State James Baker of the Iraq Study Group. ...

The letter comes amid intensified exchanges between Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in advance of next month's conference.It followed the publication late last month of another letter from five former senior U.S. diplomats with lengthy service in the Middle East, which urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to intensify herown mediation efforts to ensure a successful outcome. ...

Both letters stressed that any final communiqu coming out of the November conference should include mutual understandings between Israel and the Palestinians on five key issues that are considered centralto any final settlement that would be reached between them. Those understandings should then be enshrined in a new U.N. Security Council resolution, the letters said. ...

The two letters also called for mutual understandings about the Palestinian refugee problem, including financial compensation and resettlement assistance for those refugees who cannot or do not want to live in a new Palestinian state; and on the creation of security mechanisms that that would address Israeli concerns while respecting Palestinian sovereignty.

"Because failure risks devastating consequences in the region and beyond, it is critically important that the conference succeed," said Wednesday's letter, which was co-sponsored by the International Crisis Group, the New America Foundation and the U.S./Middle East Project. ...

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