The Israeli and Palestinian architects of an alternative plan to try to end years of bloodshed and bitterness in the Middle East have denounced what they said was a tacit agreement between extremists on both sides of the struggle to maintain the violent status quo.

"There an unsigned, an unwritten coalition between the extremists of both sides, those who will never be satisfied with any plan on earth between people who want to save their own children," said Yossi Beilin, a former minister and the chief Israeli architect of the Geneva Initiative for Middle East peace.

Beilin and former Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo were the chief architects of the initiative, an unofficial Middle East peace plan launched on December 1.

"When we came to the doors of the hall we were surprised by people who shouted at vus traitors! traitors! and the point was that both of us, Yasser and myself, didn't know who was shouted at because this is a scream against both of us," he told a meeting of over 2,000 political and intellectual figures at a meeting in central Paris late Tuesday.

Rabbo stressed that" the extremist forces in both sides try to show that our interests, our inspirations as two nations, Palestinians and Israelis can not coexist with each other, that they will contradict always. We proved that there is a solution where these inspirations and interests can coexist and can complement each other.

"We are not taking the role of governments, but if the governments are not doing their roles, we, in the name of the public opinion and of the two nations, are telling them: we will force you to negotiate and to have peace."

Beilin and Rabbo arrived in the hall at the Palais de la Mutualite to great applause, accompanied by French philosopher and media darling Bernard-Henri Levy.

Former French Prime Minister Laurent and Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe were also in attendance.

Fabius dismissed the Geneva initiative as a "marginal document" and championed the international "roadmap" for Middle East peace drawn up by Europe, Russia, the United Nations and the United States.

The international roadmap calls for an end to Palestinian violence, an end to Jewish colonisation of Palestinian territories as key stages to the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005.

The roadmap has been accepted by the Palestinian Authority while Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has given only guarded approval.

The Geneva Initiative goes further by making proposals for resolving some of the thorniest problems in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, such as the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees.

One of the most contentious chapters of the Geneva accord is its de facto renunciation of the right of return for Palestinians such as Abed Rabbo to their birthplace, which has led to accusations of "treason" from some quarters.

Much of it is a re-write of working documents for the 2000 Camp David accords under US President Bill Clinton and then continued in the Taba agreements of 2001.