US President George W. Bush has gone further than any of his predecessors in terms of acknowledging the right of Palestinians to their own state. In terms of action to back up his talk, however, Bush has been a spectacular failure. One after the other, his “visions” of Palestinian independence, calls for an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories, and plans for a “road map” to peace have been set aside in order to satisfy the demands of the Jewish state’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon. The result has been a series of flip-flops that have steadily undermined both Bush’s credibility and that of the very moderates who long for a historic agreement between Israel and Palestine.
Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt have tried mightily to impress upon Bush the importance of establishing some sort of timetable and/or agenda for the resumption of Palestinian-Israeli peace talks so that a long-oppressed people can discern a ray of hope that their ordeal is coming to an end. Instead the American president has opted to hitch his cart even more solidly to Sharon’s by claiming that the conditions are not yet right to start work on a political solution.
So surreal have the contortions of the US government become in trying to rationalize its blind support for Israeli depredations that Secretary of State Colin Powell actually proposed on Wednesday that a “temporary” Palestinian state be set up as a “transitional step.” Unfortunately, the Palestinians know all too well what they can expect during such a transition (i.e. limbo) because Sharon offers daily demonstrations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Far from obeying Bush’s demands that he end “Operation Rampart,” the warmongering former general has kept up so-called “pinpoint” strikes in the Occupied Territories since the phony pullout that have actually caused more damage than the original onslaught did. Not content with having emasculated the Palestinian Authority, Sharon has busied his powerful military with the task of shattering basic infrastructure such as water and electricity networks and foundations of civil society like schools and businesses. For variety, they periodically kill someone and then say he was a “terrorist.”
And after all this, Palestinian moderates are supposed to oppose their more militant compatriots by  insisting that Washington will come around? The more likely outcome is that increasing numbers of people will give up on negotiations and decide that the gunmen and the suicide bombers have been right all along: The only language Israel understands is force.
The root cause of the continuing crisis is occupation, something which people have a right to resist. Sharon’s insistence that Israel will not “negotiate under fire” is patent nonsense when one considers that the grand majority of armed conflicts are settled by agreements hashed out while the fighting raged. If Bush cannot understand that and force Sharon to accept it, things will get a lot worse before they get any better.

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