LONDON - BRITISH Prime Minister Gordon Brown threw his weight on Monday behind an Arab League appeal to US President-elect Barack Obama to give added urgency to the Middle East process.

Speaking after talks with Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad - and before talks with Israel's interim premier Ehud Olmert on Tuesday - he also urged Israel to stop settlement building, saying it was a 'barrier' to peace.

'We welcome the renewed focus on the Arab peace initiative embodied in the recent letter by 22 states calling for Rresident-elect Obama to prioritise achieving a comprehensive peace,' said Mr Brown.

'There is an urgency about the need to act,' he said, voicing hope that '2009 can see real progress in a settlement between the longstanding problems of the Palestinian areas and Israel.'

The 22-nation Arab League said last week that it had detailed its vision for an end to the decades-old conflict in a letter signed by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal and delivered to Mr Obama via an aide.

The League adopted a Saudi proposal in 2002 which called on Israel to withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967, in return for diplomatic relations with Arab states.

Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas urged Mr Obama after his election win last month to increase US attention on the Middle East peace process as soon as he enters the White House on Jan 20.

Later on Monday, Mr Brown told a Palestinian investment conference in London that next year should be the 'Middle East year of peace,' adding that in his first conversation with Mr Obama, the pair had agreed that a Middle East peace deal should be a priority.

Mr Brown's predecessor Tony Blair, meanwhile, said at the same conference that he thought the Arab peace initiative was crucial to an emerging consensus about how to progress the Middle East peace process.

'One of the gains in the past year which we've now got to build on is that there is really an agreed strategy in the international community as to how to deal with this,' Mr Blair told reporters.

'Now, the challenges all remain, but for the first time, there is an agreed way of dealing with them, and the Arab peace initiative is right at the centre of that.' Mr Blair, now envoy to the Middle East for the Quartet - the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia - added that 'everybody is giving this message incidentally to the new administration in America that we have to prioritise a resolution of the Israel-Palestine question.'

Meanwhile the British leader underlined the need for Israel to clamp down on settlement building.

'One of the blockages to that is clearly the settlement issue. We have consistently ... seen that as a barrier to reaching the agreement that everybody thinks is possible.

'I hope that at the talks in the next few weeks and months this will be recognised as a barrier that's got to be overcome,' he added. -- AFP