Posted on 04/15/2004 11:37:23 AM PDT by yonif
Speaking in a live interview on Israel Radio this morning, Minister Uzi Landau noted that President Bush's statements have no standing as a permanent American commitment. Landau listed a series of previous American presidential commitments that have not been honored - including a promised ban on the deployment of American made Saudi F-15s in Tabuk near Eilat.
President Bush made a veiled reference to the limits that there are to his statements during the press conference last night when he remarked that "when you have a government where the person is bigger than the institutions, that government will inevitably fail. It's when the institutions are bigger than the people that you're able to have continuity and people's hopes and aspirations realized, and peace". In America the institutions are bigger than the people - presidential commitments only have a binding status under the U.S. Constitution if they are approved by a two-thirds majority of the Senate.
Landau pointed out that the Bush letter made no reference to Israel's 14 points about the roadmap thus leaving the roadmap with its fatal flaws (under the roadmap the Quartet decides if a Palestinian state should be formed in evacuated areas based on what it considers the relative performance of the Palestinians as compared to the Israeli performance - the Palestinians are not actually required to successfully complete any security-related operations. The state is formed without requiring either Israeli consent or Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. The Bush statements also did not explicitly link the Phase II Palestinian state to the successful completion of security operations - thus essentially rendering meaningless his statement regarding Israeli control of movement between Gaza and the outside world as [even while Bush remains president and opts to honor his words] it only holds until a Phase II Palestinian state ).
Landau said that it is important to read the actual text of the letter in English. Reading from the text of the Bush letter ("It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.") Landau complained that the sentence was being mistranslated in Hebrew reports to read "and not in Israel" when the statement reads only "rather than in Israel".
It should be noted that while the media is presenting the Bush letter as some kind of commitment regarding the final status of the settlement blocs that Bush, who was careful to say in the press conference that "[T]he United States will not prejudice the outcome of final status negotiations. That matter is for the parties," in no way indicated that what would happen with the blocs except to predict in his letter that they will have a value at the negotiating table :
"[I]n light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities."
Mr. Bush may consider it "realistic", for example, for the existence of the major Israeli population centers to be such a significant negotiating card that Israel can trade them for the French Hill and Ramat Eshkol neighborhoods in Jerusalem - occupied territory in American eyes.
As for the situation in evacuated Gaza, President Bush sees building up the "capacity and will of Palestinian institutions to fight terrorism"."working together with Jordan, Egypt, and others in the international community." The caveat "will", in particular within the context of Egyptian efforts, refers to plans to co-opt the terrorists by recruiting them into the Palestinian security forces. The presence of "Jordan, Egypt, and others in the international community" on the ground will provide the Palestinians with a formidable human shield to protect them from Israeli security operations.
It makes you wonder how the Bush letter reads in arabic.
They won't be returning anywhere anytime soon. They'll be kept in camps in Syria, Jordan and Lebanon (where they really should be resettled) to use as pawns, as they have been, and to support UNWEA, which is out of business without the palestinians, their best long term clients.
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