Aknauta
03-13-2003, 08:39 PM
USNews.com Editorial 3/17/03
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman • Editor-in-Chief
A road map to nowhere
Everyone wants, or says he wants, a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After all these years, everyone ritually murmurs that peace requires sacrifice by both parties. But what it requires before anything else now is an insistence on honesty and clarity. Too many lives have been lost by evasion and ambiguity, by wishful thinking, by so-called misunderstandings that are merely the diplomatic gloss on deception and deceit, at the sick heart of which has been a Palestinian refusal to accept the existence of the State of Israel. The gift President Bush brings to this sorry state of affairs--50-odd years of resolutions and rhetoric--is moral lucidity. It is a quality that has marked his evolving worldview since 9/11. His Middle East speech last June 24 was as fair as it was explicit. It was a road map to a lasting peace anyone could understand. It is disturbing that in the nine months since then, other hands, masters of obfuscation, have been busy writing in elaborate detours that can lead only to yet another dead end.
The map the president drew, with the objective of two states living side by side in peace, dignity, and freedom, was tenanted on a fundamental assumption: that Palestinians should not expect anything--not a state, not a provisional state, not an Israeli withdrawal, not American support--until they get rid of their corrupt leaders and select new ones untainted by terrorism. The speech ended the American charade about Yasser Arafat. Bush insisted that a settlement was incompatible with a leader who has spent a lifetime involved in terrorism, most lately in the organizing, financing, and inspiring of the homicide bombings that destroyed those earlier hopes of peace. Bush put it straight: "Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism. This is unacceptable." So Bush called for a "new and different" leadership that will be "more than a cosmetic change" but a true break with the past.
Link (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030317/opinion/17edit.htm)
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman • Editor-in-Chief
A road map to nowhere
Everyone wants, or says he wants, a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After all these years, everyone ritually murmurs that peace requires sacrifice by both parties. But what it requires before anything else now is an insistence on honesty and clarity. Too many lives have been lost by evasion and ambiguity, by wishful thinking, by so-called misunderstandings that are merely the diplomatic gloss on deception and deceit, at the sick heart of which has been a Palestinian refusal to accept the existence of the State of Israel. The gift President Bush brings to this sorry state of affairs--50-odd years of resolutions and rhetoric--is moral lucidity. It is a quality that has marked his evolving worldview since 9/11. His Middle East speech last June 24 was as fair as it was explicit. It was a road map to a lasting peace anyone could understand. It is disturbing that in the nine months since then, other hands, masters of obfuscation, have been busy writing in elaborate detours that can lead only to yet another dead end.
The map the president drew, with the objective of two states living side by side in peace, dignity, and freedom, was tenanted on a fundamental assumption: that Palestinians should not expect anything--not a state, not a provisional state, not an Israeli withdrawal, not American support--until they get rid of their corrupt leaders and select new ones untainted by terrorism. The speech ended the American charade about Yasser Arafat. Bush insisted that a settlement was incompatible with a leader who has spent a lifetime involved in terrorism, most lately in the organizing, financing, and inspiring of the homicide bombings that destroyed those earlier hopes of peace. Bush put it straight: "Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism. This is unacceptable." So Bush called for a "new and different" leadership that will be "more than a cosmetic change" but a true break with the past.
Link (http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030317/opinion/17edit.htm)