Bush In Ramallah - The Road To `Peace In Our Time'

Today,our president visited the Palestinian occupied territories of Judea and Samaria(the West Bank), heading for a meeting with Palestinian President Arafat II Mahmoud Abbas.

I had previously written that President Bush would receive an honor guard that included Fatah terrorists from the Tanzim and the Al Aksa Martyr's Brigade during his foray into Ramallah.

It seems I was mistaken..President Bush is far too intelligent to put his life in these people's hands.

Instead, Palestinian security was almost entirely cut out of the event. The president was accompanied by a virtual army of 1500 Secret Service personnel, plus a security net of the Shin Bet and IDF teams on the ground who created a totally sterile zone a mile deep, virtually shutting down the roads and keeping whole sections of Ramallah in lock down, while the Palestinians were banished to the perimeter of the security zone which was closed even to Abbas' Force 17 presidential guard except for a small personal contingent on a preapproved list. The media was excluded except for a carefully vetted contingent and the Secret Service even replaced Abbas’ office furniture temporarily with American furniture they brought with them.

Now I wonder...it's obvious President Bush doesn't trust his `peace partners' very much, even after the millions of US dollars given to the Palestinians for `security'.

So why is he demanding that the Israelis do so?

Even worse were the President's remarks in Ramallah.

"There should be an end to the [Israeli] occupation that began in 1967," he said. "The agreement must establish Palestine as a homeland for the Palestinian people, just as Israel is a homeland for the Jewish people."

The president apparently forgot or simply doesn't care that 80% of Palestine was already given to the Arabs for a homeland in 1923, by the British, in defiance of the League of Nations Mandate. Or that Judea and Samaria(the West Bank) were illegally occupied by Jordan after 1948 in an action that was not recognized by the US or the UN, and thus belonged to no country when retaken by Israel in 1967 after Jordan attacked the Jewish State. Or that any Arab claim to these areas came from Israel as part of the Oslo Accords, an agreement that was ignored and breached by Mahmoud Abbas' old boss Yasir Arafat in every respect.

The effrontery of our president to deliberately ignore history and international law in this way is absolutely stunning.

The president is also demanding, like Secretary of State Condi Rice that the Palestinian state be `contigious'. To anyone who bothers to look at a map, the only way that could happen would be to split Israel in two, or to take significant amounts of Israeli territory in the Negev and give it to the Palestinians, reducing Israel to a narrow and indefensible Jewish ghetto hugging the sea. Especially if the Bush Administration's other plans come to fruition and Israel bows to pressure to give the Golan back to Syria for promises of `peace'.

Not only that, but the president has a plan to deal with the refugee issue. But only for the Arab refugees of the 1948 conflict. He wants a multi-billion dollar fund set up as `compensation' for them, on top of the millions of dollars they've already received and expects Israel to contribute, while not even sparing a thought for the almost 1 million Jews ethnically cleansed from the Arab world for no reason other than the fact they were Jews. Those refugees, unlike the Arabs, were settled in Israel at Israel's expense, without a penny's help from the UN.

Not only that, but the president has absolutely no thought for the Jewish refugees that will be created if he gets what he wants and thousands of Jews are forced out of their homes. Israel has not even been able to cope thus far with providing for the Jews who were forced out of Gaza by their own country.

Amazingly, President Bush had the nerve to use harsh words for the very Israeli security forces that were protecting him in Ramallah, criticized the checkpoints that helped keep him secure and safe and actually warned the IDF not to make incursions into Palestinian occupied territory..even when Palestinian `security' forces are blatantly involved in attacks against Israel's civilians, as they were in Nablus recently.

"To the extent that Israeli actions have undermined the effectiveness of the Palestinian force, or the authority of the state relative to the average citizen, [that] is something that we don't agree with and have made our position clear," Mr Bush said at a joint press conference with Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian Authority president.

Actually, this is fairly consistent as far as President Bush goes. After all, if he's consistently refused to protect the borders of his own country, there's no reason for him to support Israel protecting theirs.Except in the USA, we're mostly dealing with people seeking jobs so far, while the Israelis are dealing with people seeking to kill them.

What the president had to say was entirely consistent with the new order in the Middle East.

Like Oslo, this is another attempt at `solving' the Arab-Israeli conflict. It involves using a weak Israeli leader as a tool, forcing Israel to make important strategic concessions and making another corner of the Middle East Jew-free for worthless guarantees that will never be kept. And it also allows a US president to take credit for the attempt as a `legacy' and please the Saudis and the other oil-rich Arab states at the same time..a win-win scenario for a president looking forward towards retirement, and mindful of his family's interests.

Like Oslo, it will also result in a lot of dead Jews and the establishment of an Islamist enclave in a highly strategic location if President Bush and Condi Rice get what they want. Only this time, the stakes will be much higher for America if an `inconvenient' Israel is either marginalized as a US ally or destroyed.

President Bush will have to live with the judgement of history for his actions in this matter.And according to the religion he professes to believe in, the president may someday face an even harsher judgement than that of history.