Seven years after he inherited the power to bring Israel to heel and the power to make a just and honorable future to the Palestinians, President George W. Bush finally arrives today. He arrives at the site of the foreign policy failure that has undermined everything else he has tried to achieve in the Middle East and in the wider Muslim world.
His three-day visit to Israel and occupied Palestine is arguably some 2,500 days too late. Had he been prepared in the early days of his presidency to talk to Yasser Arafat, had he been prepared to give real substance to what would instead quickly become the blood-stained road map to peace, rather than backing the Israeli pretence that it was the victim and not the aggressor, how different the world might be today! America’s spectacular failure to deal justly with the Palestinian tragedy during Bush’s years in office lies at the heart of the distrust and anger at Washington’s hypocrisy that has caused so much violence.
Saddam Hussain was overt in his support for the Palestinians; so, by extension, in the narrow White House view, the Palestinians were also the enemy. Bush said he toppled Saddam in order to make Iraq and the wider Middle East beacons of democracy. Yet when the Palestinians elected a Hamas government democratically, Bush did not examine the despair that informed the calculations of voters and the hope that a tough line on Israeli recognition would work where endless appeasement had failed. Instead he said Hamas was a terrorist organization, uninterested in the political process and froze them out. Mahmoud Abbas, the man Washington had welcomed as Arafat’s successor, warned a year before the election that if Bush did not support moderate Palestinians, extremism would win. In thrall to Israel and the US Zionist lobby, Bush’s support for the Abbas administration was too weak and the Palestinian leader was proven right.
Bush believes his visit will somehow negate the growing influence of Iran, his new worst enemy. What of course he does not understand is that much of Iran’s diplomatic strength and, indeed, the poisoned well of Al-Qaeda propaganda flows from the manifest injustices that Bush and his predecessors in the White House have inflicted on the Palestinians for 60 years. Israel’s US-bred nuclear weapons prompted Iran to acquire them and Saddam to try to do the same. Israel’s US-condoned aggression and defeat in Lebanon empowered Hezbollah and gave Iran dangerous leverage in a country still recovering from 30 years of civil strife.
So now, in the wake of the flickering flame of hope that was rekindled at Annapolis, Bush has come to Israel and Palestine to review his work. He may even believe that Palestinian-Israeli talks may lead to a settlement before he leaves the Oval Office. No one in the region would begrudge him his transformed legacy if this happened. But nothing about this president suggests he has the vision to broker a breakthrough. Nor indeed will he have the wisdom to say the most significant word of all — “Sorry.”
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