Bush insists vision of Palestinian state lives
US - U.S. President George W. Bush declared in farewell talks with
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Monday that the vision of a
Palestinian state remained alive, despite failure to achieve their goal
of a peace deal this year.
With two months left in office, Bush reiterated that the eventual
creation of a democratic Palestinian state alongside Israel — an
objective he now leaves to President-elect Barack Obama — would help end
decades of Middle East conflict.
“I believe that vision is alive and needs to be worked on,” Bush told
reporters as he and Olmert, who will also step down early next year,
held a final meeting at the White House.
The United States, Israel and the Palestinians have all acknowledged
they will not have a peace accord in place before Bush vacates the White
House on Jan. 20, missing a target date set at an Annapolis peace
conference a year ago.
Most analysts were skeptical from the start, saying Bush’s peace bid
was too little, too late, after much of his two terms largely disengaged
from Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy.
Despite that, Olmert — who will leave under a cloud of corruption
charges after a Feb. 10 parliamentary election — showered Bush with
praise for setting the Annapolis process in motion and reaffirmed a
two-state solution as the “only possible way” to achieve peace.
Obama, who visited Israel and the occupied West Bank in July, pledged
at the time — in an apparent swipe at Bush’s last-minute peace efforts —
not to “wait a few years into my term or my second term if I’m elected”
to press for a deal.
Although Olmert has vowed to pursue peace until his last day in
office, little progress has been made in negotiations and public
interest in Israel in the lame-duck leader’s policies is waning as an
election campaign gathers speed.
Opinion polls in Israel show former Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party leading the ruling centrist Kadima
faction in the election.
Netanyahu has said he would focus peace efforts on shoring up the
Palestinian economy rather than on territorial issues, a policy that
could spell the end of the Annapolis process.
Olmert has been increasingly vocal about what he sees as the need for
Israel to relinquish nearly all the land it occupied in the 1967 Middle
East war in return for peace, while retaining major Jewish settlement
blocs.
Palestinian officials said the commitment came too late and Olmert’s
successor as Kadima leader, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, has not voiced
support for his position. “It’s not easy to try to change the paradigm,”
Bush said, alluding to the obstacles to Israeli-Palestinan peace. Bush
had been looking for an end-of-term foreign policy success to boost a
legacy burdened by the unpopular Iraq war. But peace talks launched
after Annapolis have been hobbled by Israeli political upheaval,
disputes over Israeli settlement expansion and violent flare-ups in and
around the Gaza Strip.
Iran’s nuclear program was also on the agenda, but neither leader
mentioned it when reporters were allowed briefly into the Oval Office at
the start of the meeting.
Washington, Thursday, Reuters
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