Recipe for terror
Gerald Kaufman attacks Bush for supporting Ariel Sharon's 'disengagement' plan, which, he says, will inevitably result in more Israeli deaths 0 ne morning this week I got into conversation with a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman at the 274 bus stop in St John's Wood. She told me that she was having an apartment built in Israel and that her daughter, on aliyah (the Hebrew word for immigration to the Holy Land), was a doctor in Jerusalem.
This nice lady told me, 'I would defend Israel with my last breath.' So, it might be thought: here was exactly the kind of person who would have been delighted by last week's accord between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel at the White House in Washington and who, though a peaceable soul, would not have been displeased by the death in Gaza of the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Ratissi, whose murder was authorised as soon as Sharon got back from the US.
Dream on. My bus-stop conversationalist was appalled that a situation had been so exacerbated as to impel Palestinian terrorists to murder even more Israelis (some of which earlier victims her daughter had known personally), which would emphasise still further the contrast between relative Israeli affluence and Palestinian impoverishment, and which would delay into the indiscernible future any chance of peace for the long-suffering Israeli people.
She said that her daughter's original idealism at going to live in the land of her forefathers had vanished, to be replaced by continual apprehension at living in the middle of a powder keg. This decent, thoughtful Jewish woman, far from being beguiled by the facile clichés uttered by George W. Bush, saw only tragedy ahead for the Middle East.
Almost exactly two years ago in the House of Commons I described Ariel Sharon as a 'war criminal'. I added that, even worse, he was a fool. That verdict has been emphasised by the Dead Sea fruit that he bore away from Washington with such triumphalism. For this victory for his home-made 'disengagement' policy will mean many more deaths of Israelis at the hands of Palestinian terrorists, preying on the despair of Palestinians who now see no future for themselves other than as serfs under the occupying Israelis' desert boots.
In the Seder service for the Passover, which was recited in religious Jewish homes in Israel and the diaspora earlier this month, there is a telling reminiscence: Avadim hayinu b'Mitzrayim' — 'We were slaves in Egypt.' What the Egyptian Pharaoh did to the Jews, the Jews have now done to the Palestinians — except that the Palestinians have no Moses to bring them salvation, and no Red Sea will part for them.
If Sharon's policy of disengagement is a calculated political ploy that deliberately will delay indefinitely the peace settlement to which he pays lip service while undermining it in every way possible, Bush's endorsement of that policy is even more dangerous. For a hardline Israeli policy endorsed by the President of the United States transforms the political landscape in the Middle East. What Sharon left implicit by talking about withdrawing all 7,000 Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip and a handful of settlers from the West Bank, Bush made explicit in his statement of endorsement, in which he spoke of the growth of Jewish settlements on the West Bank as 'new realities on the ground' and of realism requiring any final agreement for separate Israeli and Palestinian states to reflect 'these realities'.
And, at a stroke, he dismissed any aspi
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