George W. Bush’s arrival in Jerusalem to celebrate Wednesday’s 60th anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel – the most powerful nation on earth standing shoulder to shoulder with the most powerful country in the Middle East – should be pregnant with political possibility. Instead, it is merely poignant.
Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, told the US president who has done so much damage in the Middle East, that “you stood like nobody else on our side”. True, but not helpful to Israel’s long-term interests. America’s standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds has been brought so low by Mr Bush that its friendship is toxic. Even more important, the written guarantees Mr Bush gave former prime minister Ariel Sharon on April 14 2004 – in effect signing over the main Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Arab east Jerusalem to Israeli sovereignty – will, if honoured, place a two-states solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict beyond reach...
The consequences of this for Israel’s future would be profound.
Mr Bush ostensibly supports a Palestinian state, picking up where the failed Oslo process left off. But that means Israel returning almost all the land it seized in the 1967 six-day war – the 22 per cent of colonial Palestine Palestinians are prepared to accept as a historic compromise.
Ehud Olmert, Israel’s prime minister, says unless Israelis seize this last chance of a two-states solution, they will be demographically overwhelmed and forced into becoming an apartheid state.
But the second big cloud over Israel’s future is that, even though a majority of its citizens back a two-states solution, it appears politically incapable of producing leaders who can close the deal. Yitzhak Rabin might have come round to the need to return all the West Bank and east Jerusalem; we shall never know since he was assassinated by a Jewish religious extremist...
