WASHINGTON - In a historic policy shift, President Bush on Wednesday endorsed Israel's plan to hold on to part of the West Bank in any final peace settlement with the Palestinians. Bush also ruled out Palestinian refugees returning to Israel, bringing strong criticism from the Palestinians.

An elated Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said his plan to pull back from parts of the West Bank and Gaza, hailed by Bush, would create "a new and better reality for the state of Israel."
But Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia -- with whom the Bush administration deals while boycotting leader Yasser Arafat -- called Bush "the first president who has legitimized the (Israeli) settlements in Palestinian territories."

"We as Palestinians reject that," Qureia said. "We cannot accept that. We reject it and we refuse it." Arafat earlier called the idea "the complete end of the peace process." And Palestinian Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat said of Bush's statement: "This is like someone giving a part of Texas' land to China."

"If Israel wants to make peace, it must talk to the Palestinian leadership," Erekat said.

Palestinian leaders had previously said they had been assured by the Bush administration they would be consulted before any endorsement of Sharon's plan.

... Previous U.S. administrations have described Jewish settlements as obstacles to peace. One of Bush's predecessors, Jimmy Carter, went even further and called them illegal.

A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Sharon thought that no American president had ever made concessions so important to Israel as Bush did on Wednesday.

... Bush called Sharon's plan historic and urged Palestinians to match Israel's "boldness and courage."

... Past U.S. presidents have operated on the assumption there could be some changes in Israel's borders. But Bush went much further.

He committed himself to Israel's retention of parts of the West Bank settlements in a letter to Sharon in which he said that approach was necessary for Israel's security -- an approach long taken by the former general.

In another major concession sought by Sharon, Bush said a final peace deal should provide for Palestinian refugees to be resettled in a Palestinian state, not in Israel.

This is a shameful capitulation. ... the statement overturns in one stroke almost 40 years of official U.S. policy -- a policy Shrub's father actually showed a fair amount of political courage in defending. For decades, Israeli leaders (Likud and Labor alike) have worked to create those "new realities on the ground" -- as the statement, with the usual neocon arrogance, describes them -- through illegal land expropriations, relentless discrimination against Palestinian landowners, and lavish government subsidies for Jewish settlers. And for decades, the U.S. government has refused to accept Israel's bullyboy tactics, despite the relentless, continuous efforts of the pro-Israel lobby in Washington.

That's gone now -- and probably for good.... Today's statement essentially guts the road map (itself a largely gutless process) by deleting the essential principle that the final status of the territories will not be determined by unilateral action on either side (which in the real world, means on the Israeli side.) It also negates the fundamental premise of UN Resolution 242 -- the bedrock of all peace efforts over the past 40 years -- that territory will not be acquired by force.

Indeed, Sharon actually ends up with something better than an approved settlement list from Bush. He gets virtual carte blanche to keep any settlement he wishes to keep -- and indeed, to grab any part of the West Bank he wishes to grab, as long as it can be connected in some way to those "existing major Israeli populations centers." And if you know anything about Israel's settlement policies in the occupied territories, you know how good they are at connecting things.

By stipulating, in the broadest possible way, the "facts on the ground" that must be incorporated into any final status agreement, the neocons have made a complete mockery of the U.S. commitment to a viable Palestinian state...

To call this document the most craven, under-handed and one-sided agreement ever negotiated by the U.S. government would be unfair. There are, after all, those 19th century Indian treaties to take into account. But it's pretty clear that, rumors of their demise notwithstanding, the neocons are alive and kicking, and still have a death grip on the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It seems almost inconceivable to me that having plunged America into the bloody quicksand in Iraq, the neocons are now to receive as their reward an only modestly reduced version of their dream of a Greater Israel. Fuck up and move up indeed.

The net result of this nasty little backroom deal won't just be further violence and random butchery in the territories and in Israel proper. It's also going to contribute to the progressive degeneration of the war against terrorism into the war against the Arabs -- if not the war against the entire Islamic world. The line in front of the Al Qaeda recruiting office is going to get a little bit longer; the struggle to stabilize a rebellious Iraq is going to become a little harder, and a future in which a large part of a major American city disappears in a nuclear firestorm is going to become a little more likely.