U.S. expected to back Israeli settlement
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| Wed, 04-14-2004 - 11:27am |
U.S. expected to back Israeli settlement plan
Sharon to get Bush endorsement on keeping some West Bank land
Wednesday, April 14, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON -- President Bush is planning to issue a declaration today that his aides say will recognize Israel's right to retain some Jewish settlements in the West Bank when its boundaries are negotiated with the Palestinians.
The declaration, to be made when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel visits the White House, would represent a subtle but substantial shift in U.S. policy, which has viewed the settlements as obstacles to peace and asserted that final borders must be arrived at through negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
Administration officials also said that Bush would assert that Palestinian refugees from families that formerly resided in what is now Israel should live in a future Palestinian state to be created on the West Bank and Gaza Strip rather than in the Israeli lands they continue to claim.
The officials said that the declarations -- planned for today as part of an elaborately planned visit by Sharon -- are a recognition of reality and similar to peace proposals put forward in private in 2000 by President Clinton.
They appear to fall short of what Sharon had been seeking -- an acceptance of five specific settlement blocs and an outright rejection of the Palestinian "right of return" to Israel.
The exact language and form of the assurances, and whether they are to be made public right away, were being discussed last night. An Israeli official said that aides to Sharon were also studying the language before Sharon's visit.
Bush's assurances could be part of a letter, or a preamble to a letter, or simply a statement from the president, an administration official said. The statement would be that Israel's future borders would have to recognize "demographic realities" since 1967.
That language, officials said, was code for at least some settlements in the West Bank, where Jewish settlers number some 230,000.
The language that would implicitly reject the complete Palestinian "right of return" would be similarly opaque, according to administration officials, in that it would simply reiterate Israel's identity as a Jewish state and suggest that Palestinians should move, in a final settlement, to their own state rather than Israel.
By offering such limited concessions to Sharon, the administration seemed to be hoping not to alienate the Palestinians, who have rejected Sharon's plan to keep some settlements.
The Israeli leader arrived in Washington yesterday morning and spent the day huddled with aides. He met late yesterday with Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser.
"The United States is prepared to adopt some kind of language recognizing the demographic realities that have occurred since 1967," said an administration official, referring to settlements outside the boundaries of Israel before it captured the West Bank and Gaza in a war with neighboring Arab countries.
Administration officials said that, by giving these two endorsements of longstanding Israeli objectives, Bush and his aides were hoping to give Sharon political support for his plan to pull Israeli forces and settlers from Gaza and small parts of the West Bank.
Sharon announced his intention to withdraw from these areas in December, raising a storm of protest among his most conservative supporters in his own Likud governing party. In response, the Israeli leader has scheduled a nationwide referendum among party members to get backing for his plan.
Israeli officials say Sharon wants to breaks dramatically from his own views since at least the 1970s, when he served as a Cabinet minister and personally fathered the idea of populating Gaza and the West Bank with Jewish settlements as a way to enhance Israel's security.
Palestinians have seen the settlements as a land grab and long demanded their complete dismantlement as part of any peace accord with Israel.
In Sharon's eyes, according to his aides, the unilateral withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlements from even a small part of these areas has emerged as the only alternative because of the failure of Yasser Arafat and other Palestinian leaders to guarantee Israel's security needs.
Sharon is known to feel that the withdrawal is a substitute for the faltering negotiations over the past two years under the so-called "road map" pressed by the Bush administration in concert with the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
Before endorsing Sharon's withdrawals, the United States has managed to get Israel to say that the pullout should not be seen as a substitute for the "road map" but only as a "parking place" while Israel waits for a suitable negotiating partner to emerge on the Palestinian side.
But as Sharon's visit approached, the administration has sounded increasingly supportive of his plan.
The Bush administration, while endorsing the Sharon withdrawal plan in principle, has spent recent weeks trying to assure itself that Egypt and Jordan would help prevent the emergence of Hamas or other Palestinian radicals in Gaza.
Finally, the administration wants Israel's commitment that it will not walk away from the idea of negotiating eventually with Palestinians to achieve a Palestinian state, as Arabs and Europeans especially fear.
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The mainstream, majority of the Israeli people loudly and instantly condemn any act of atrocity that their own side commits. They will not stand for attrocities to be committed. Not so with the Palestenian people. There is a LOUD SILENCE among them. This is my point. This makes them stand out, imo, among almost any other society. By their silence they are saying that these acts, as long as they are committed against Jews is not attrocious, is acceptable.>>
This is not true based on any empiric evidence you have provided. Even if it were true, it is not an excuse to kill Palestinians in droves, destroy their homes, leave their children hungry, uproot their olive groves or any of the other cruel acts that Israel has committed against them.
Why, might I ask, is there such a LOUD SILENCE from you regarding the 500 Palestinian children who have been killed by the Israelis? Why the LOUD SILENCE from you regarding the mothers, babies, elderly and sick who have died agonizing deaths at checkpoints as Israeli soldiers mill around pointing guns at everyone? Why the LOUD SILENCE at the mentally disabled bellringer in Bethlehem who was shot dead by the IDF as he went to ring the church bells? Why the LOUD SILENCE at the man in a wheelchair who was run over by an Israeli tank as if he was a possum in the road? Why the LOUD SILENCE as ancient olive groves cultivated by Palestinians for hundreds of years as sustenance crops are uprooted and sold to Israelis to put in their gardens?
Let me guess...these people, the retarded, the sick, the elderly, the babies, the pregnant young mothers, the farmers, the handicapped and infirm, the children, the diabetic, the heart patients, the deaf who can't hear the warnings from the IDF to go inside, the blind who are tear gassed in their school buildings DIDN'T GIVE YOU A GROVELING APOLOGY for Israeli terrorism, and you, with a cheap self-righteousness, have meted out a brutal sentence of collective justice on them.
Please don't lecture me, the Palestinians or anyone else about morality and justice.
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You are apparently incapable of addressing the war criminals and terrorists elected to prime minister by the Israeli public. You are also incapable of addressing the fact that the "mainstream" Israelis who decry terrorism names streets after terrorist gangs who killed many innocent people. Why don't we start with you addressing those two issues first, and move on from there?
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The cheap self-reflection of the Israelis must be a comfort to those who are hungry, frightened, maimed, burned, shot, crushed, humiliated, homeless and hopeless.
The mainstream of Israeli culture condones "transfer" (ethnic cleansing) and has elected a war criminal as prime minister. Virtually every Israeli is expected to serve in the army, and therefore has some involvement in supporting the occupation. This may be "normal" to you, but it isn't "normal" in my opinion.
Again, I don't wan't a groveling apology. Actually they don't owe *me* an apology at all. I have offered my opinion. The Palestenian society is different from most civilized societies in that the mainstream of that society raises their children to be anti-semitic to the point of SUPPORTING ATTROCITIES committed against the jews. The Israeli's do not raise their children to hate the Palestenians to the point of supporting attrocities committed against them.
I also believe that if the Palestenians would stop using terrorism to murder innocent Israeli's, that the Israeli's would stop retaliating.
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