Hurting our Arab friends

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Hurting our Arab friends dan pointedly postponed the visit he was scheduled to have today with President Bush, it dramatized a major drawback in Bush's siding with Israel last week to dictate key peace terms to the Palestinians.

The Bush deal with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, endorsing the latter's unilat- eral "disengagement" plan, is a se- vere blow to moderate Arab leaders who are important to U.S. interests in that volatile region. The president scrapped decades of American policy when he publicly accepted the permanence of large Jewish settlements in occupied Pales- tinian territory.

Bush also joined in Sharon's rejec- tion of a "right of return" for Pales. tinian refugees displaced from their former homes in recurrent conflict over the creation of Israel. The refu- gees, Bush said, would have to reside within a new Palestinian state.

These issues were supposed to be subject to bargaining in future Pales- tinian Israeli negotiations, in line with Bush's "road map" to a two-state solution. Abdullah is not the only friendly Arab leader dismayed by Bush's abandonment of his "honest broker" role to court pro-israel votes in his re-election campaign.

President Hos- ni Mubarak of Egypt, whose country was the first to sign a peace treaty with Israel, now says there is "un- precedented hatred" of America in the Arab world, because of both the war in Iraq and Bush's embrace of Sharon's policy on Palestine. The Bush-Sharon deal is generally deplored by those promoting demo- cratic reform in the Arab nations.

We had thought the president was a champion of such reform, among his announced goals in Iraq. But he un- dermines the democratic cause with unfairness to the Palestinians.

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"Hurting our Arab friends," Park City Daily News, 19 July 2023. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2023-087. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2023-087