April 16, 2004

Bush backs Israel's land claim

President Bush yesterday endorsed Israel's claim to a disputed portion of the West Bank and said Palestinian refugees must settle outside Israel, prompting anger from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
    
The shift in Mr. Bush's Middle East policy reflected a growing frustration with Mr. Arafat's support for terrorism. But the president also backed a move by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to placate the Palestinians withdrawal of Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and a section of the West Bank.
    
By claiming other land in the West Bank, Mr. Sharon dashed the hopes of Palestinians who had sought a return to borders drawn more than a half-century ago. They wanted those borders incorporated into final peace talks with Israel.
[Not only that; the Paleostinians made East Jerusalem a necessary concession, as well, knowing full well it was asking the impossible!--Jen]
    
"In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949," the president said in a joint press conference with Mr. Sharon.
    
The smiling prime minister was clearly pleased to have secured the president's support in keeping at least some of Israel's gains in the 1967 war, when it seized Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
[This doesn't include the gains of the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Israel got even more.--J.T.]

 "I, myself, have been fighting terrorism for many years," Mr. Sharon said in the White House. "In all these years, I have never met a leader as committed as you are, Mr. President, to the struggle for freedom and the need to confront terrorism wherever it exists."
    
Israeli officials expressed deep satisfaction with Mr. Bush's statement, seen as critical to Mr. Sharon's hopes of selling the political plan back home.
    
"Understandings reached today between the prime minister and President Bush gives us the assurance to move forward, to take the risks that go with giving up territory and evacuating established settlements," said Daniel Ayalon, Israeli ambassador to the United States.
    
Officials said that logistically and politically it would take Israel nine months to a year to implement the plan.
    
Mr. Arafat denounced the new U.S.-Israeli agreement.
[BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! Araf*rt has seen those terrorist chickens coming home to roost at last!
Looks as if his con game is just about over and high time, too!]
[...]
"The Palestinian leadership warns of the dangers of reaching such an accord, because it means clearly the complete end of the peace process," he said in a statement.
[These Paleos "slay" me! They can't believe their game of "peace for land through jihadi murder" isn't working anymore!]
    
Mr. Arafat added that the pact would prompt a "cycle of violence and end all the signed agreements"[...which were worthless anyway because the Palis never meant to keep their part of the bargains] between Israel and the Palestinians.
   
 A senior administration official acknowledged that U.S.-Israeli talks have "obviously generated a lot of anxiety," but suggested that Mr. Arafat's reaction was unfair.
[...]
"If people will take the time and look at the language and put it in the broader context of the opportunity that is here they will, on reflection, see that there is really an opportunity for peace," the official added.
   
 White House officials said Mr. Bush was trying to "jump-start" the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians.

But the president risked alienating Arabs by softening his opposition to a security wall Israel is erecting to separate itself from Palestinian territories. Mr. Bush, who once called the wall "a problem," yesterday appeared to endorse it.
   
 "I am strongly committed to the security of Israel," he told Mr. Sharon. "The barrier being erected by Israel as a part of that security effort should, as your government has stated, be a security rather than a political barrier.
    
"It should be temporary, rather than permanent, and therefore not prejudice any final status issues, including final borders," the president added.
    
The deal yesterday, if implemented, means that Mr. Sharon would withdraw all settlements from Gaza, where about 7,000 Israelis have settled among 1.3 million Palestinians. It was not clear how many of the 220,000 Israelis living among the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank would leave.

As for Palestinian refugees who end up behind Israeli borders, Mr. Bush made clear that they would have to move.
    
"It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel," he said.
    
When a reporter pointed out that former President Jimmy Carter had said last week that U.S. Middle East policy is tilted too much toward Israel, Mr. Bush said: "U.S. Middle East policy is tilted toward peace."
[Woohoo! Bush gets off a zinger to that IslamoNazi appeaser Jimmuh "Peanut-Brain" Carter! I love it!]

"I'm the first American president ever to have articulated the creation of a Palestinian state," he said. "Palestinians have got to assume the responsibility of fighting off terror if they want a state which provided a hopeful future for their people.

Yes, therein lies the rub (if you'll forgive my borrowing from Shakespeare!):
to get their own state, the "Palestinians" must stop supporting terror and yet being Islamist terrorists is the very essence of who they are.
Demanding that they "fight off terror" is almost as difficult for them as asking them to stop breathing (which maybe how it turns out for most of them).
It's a New Day in the Middle East.
Many of us knew when President Bush made his historic Rose Garden speech on June 24, 2002 that he had totally changed the conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian "peace process" forever.
Good thing, too.
It was destined to lead nowhere, except to more dead Israelis.
And Arafat has been getting suicide bombers to commit martyrdom and keeping his people in poverty for decades based on his false promises that he would "get them" Israel's land and push all the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea.
Winning concessions as he did at Camp David in 1979 and Oslo in 1994 for doing nothing for Israel was his way to "feed the beast" and to urge his fellow "Palestinians" on to further murderous acts to coerce Israel, with added pressure from the rest of the Western World, to give them what they demanded but didn't deserve, didn't win, and had no other possibility to get.
Who knows what happens now: we're in untravelled territory (Here, there be monsters?).
I hope that this is the beginning of the end of the Intifada and Israel's 57-year-long struggle with the Muslim world to have their own land in peace.
But what the "Palestinians" will do without Arafish's false promises is anyone's guess!