Bush’s trip provides glimmer of hope

WASHINGTON — It would be easy to point to President Bush’s trip to the Middle East and sum it up with our usual smart journalistic jeers.

After all, by the time he left for Israel, the Palestine territories, Kuwait and points south, the administration had not even bothered to name working groups for the “peace process” kicked off so ostentatiously last fall in Annapolis. Monitoring mechanisms were not in place. As for the Israelis and Palestinians, their negotiators had held only two meetings.

Once he was actually on the ground in Israel and then approaching the territories, W. was again that curious mixture of himself: half naif who doesn’t quite “get” the world, and half cynic who dismisses the worst depredations as simply part of the human experience.

Is there is anyone familiar with the Middle East who doesn’t know that the Israelis have for years tormented the Palestinians with their oppressive road checkpoints (designed to humiliate them on every level)?

Yet when his presidential motorcade was forced to travel by road to Ramallah, their planned helicopter trip sidelined by the weather, Bush was half-impressed, half-cynical.

“My whole motorcade of a mere 45 cars was able to make it through without being stopped,” the president told the press, before he added, “I’m not so exactly sure that’s what happens to the average person.”

Really, Mr. President?

In other respects, this trip, admittedly so little and so late, represented some small but important moves forward — and the president deserves credit for these.

Most important by far was W.’s call for an international compensation fund for Palestinian refugees as a “point of departure” for negotiators on a peace agreement between the two parties. He considered this, he said, one of a number of “new international mechanisms” to finally resolve the refugee issue.

All these many years, progress has been blocked by several demands, a major one being the Palestinian demand that their refugees, sent out into the world following the Israeli victories of 1967, must be allowed to return to Israel proper. In effect, the end of a “Jewish state.”

Thus, President Bush’s compensation fund idea, was not only unprecedented but was one of his first gestures of empathy with the Palestinians’ cause.

Occupation acknowledged

Implicit and explicit in his statements was also the idea that Israel’s presence was an “occupation,” something the Israelis have always denied. He was forceful on the issue that a Palestinian state must be contiguous — i.e., not interrupted by Israeli roads and settlements, as has been happening; and he further said that the Palestinians must be able to build up their own security forces and government institutions uninhibited, and declared clearly that the Israeli settlements were obstacles to peace, not just the illegal outposts.

Of course, the president’s relations with the Israeli leadership, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, were infinitely more warm and friendly than those with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, but that was to be expected.

Despite these hopeful signs, by the end of the trip, the most important indicator of the indecision of the moment occurred when Bush was asked whether a Palestinian state could be realized by the time he leaves office. Bush retreated to a cautious mode. It was, he said, “the definition of a state” that could be achieved.

And so we were back to defining a problem rather than moving forward to solve it.

The essential ambivalence toward the peace process, which underlies so many of the attitudes toward it, remains on many levels. It is difficult to think of a peace treaty actually being agreed upon, much less signed and ratified by the end of the year, and yet, one can be forgiven an inner hope that somehow things are moving forward.

To allow a tiny piece of land (Palestine) and a few million of the region’s poorest people to define the whole region is increasingly ridiculous. George W. Bush, if you carry this through, we’ll forgive you a lot of things.

Universal Press Syndicate