A fly in the ointment of peace

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Haaretz reports on U.S. President George W. Bush’s trip to the West Bank:

The president said Israel and the Palestinians must both live up to their commitments under the long-dormant road map for peace.

“On the Israeli side that includes ending settlement expansion and removing unauthorized outposts,” Bush said.
On the Palestinian side that includes confronting terrorists and dismantling terrorist infrastructure … no agreement and no Palestinian state will be born of terror.”

Bush added that a future Palestinian state can’t look like “Swiss cheese“—rather, it has to be “viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent.” He also used the word “occupation” to describe the Israeli presence in the West Bank, a loaded term in Israeli politics that was unexpectedly deployed by former PM Ariel Sharon in 2003 (and has since become less loaded). In other words, Bush went farther than he has in the past to express his sympathy for the Palestinian side of the argument.

But the Israeli government isn’t convinced that “ending settlement expansion” is in Israel’s interests. The Jerusalem Post has the latest:

Israel will continue building in Jerusalem as well as in major settlement blocs in the West Bank, even as a construction freeze continues elsewhere in the territories, a senior Israeli official said Thursday.

The remarks come just two days after US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told The Jerusalem Post that the US opposes any new construction in the southeastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa, and does not distinguish between Israeli building in east Jerusalem and the West Bank.

It’s not clear whether Bush meant “ending settlement expansion” to include the deeply controversial Har Homa, but Rice, at least, seemed unusually unequivocal and explicit about it. We’ll have to see what happens next.