US President George W. Bush broke with decades of US Middle East policy on Wednesday by saying that Israel could keep some of the Arab land it captured in the 1967 Middle East war, drawing a furious Palestinian response.
Bush coupled the statement with an endorsement of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's unilateral Gaza pullout plan and a negation of any right of return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel.
"In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population 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," Bush said at a White House news conference with a beaming Sharon.
A senior Israeli official in Sharon's entourage called the statement unprecedented. For decades, through Republican and Democratic administrations, the US has officially viewed Israeli settlements as an obstacle to peace.
Bush, who like Sharon has made a battle against "terrorism" paramount in Middle East peacemaking under a US-backed "road map," has now shifted to view at least some of the enclaves as a fait accompli.
"Things were said here by the Americans that were never said before by any president or any administration," the senior Israeli official said.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie, seeing the sum of all his people's fears realized, immediately denounced the statement as unacceptable.
"Bush is the first US president to give legitimacy to Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. We reject this, we will not accept it," he told reporters at his West Bank home.
"Nobody in the world has the right to give up Palestinian rights," he said.
Israel has planted some 120 settlements in the West Bank since it captured the area along with the Gaza Strip in the 1967 Middle East war. It has ringed Jerusalem with large Jewish suburbs, some of which were partially built on occupied land.
Bush's statement had wide political ramifications at home and abroad. It may go down well with conservative and some Jewish voters in the US presidential election but could inflame the Arab world and hurt efforts to stabilize Iraq.
The statement and letters in the same vein that Bush and Sharon exchanged could go a long way toward helping the Israeli leader push his plan to scrap 21 Jewish settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank through a binding vote in his Likud party on May 2.
"These steps described in the plan will ... make a real contribution towards peace," Bush said in his letter to Sharon.
In his letter to Bush, Sharon said full implementation of the road map, which charts reciprocal steps toward creation of a Palestinian state by next year "represents the sole means to make genuine progress."
But, the prime minister added: "As you have stated, a Palestinian state will never be created by terror, and Palestinians must engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure."
Palestinian Negotiations Minister Saeb Erekat told CNN Bush's statement violated international law, which viewed the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights as temporary, pending a final peace settlement.
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said that it would redesign the written portion of the driver’s license exam to make it more rigorous. “We hope that the exam can assess drivers’ understanding of traffic rules, particularly those who take the driver’s license test for the first time. In the past, drivers only needed to cram a book of test questions to pass the written exam,” Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Shih-kai (陳世凱) told a news conference at the Taoyuan Motor Vehicle Office. “In the future, they would not be able to pass the test unless they study traffic regulations
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
‘COMING MENACINGLY’: The CDC advised wearing a mask when visiting hospitals or long-term care centers, on public transportation and in crowded indoor venues Hospital visits for COVID-19 last week increased by 113 percent to 41,402, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday, as it encouraged people to wear a mask in three public settings to prevent infection. CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said weekly hospital visits for COVID-19 have been increasing for seven consecutive weeks, and 102 severe COVID-19 cases and 19 deaths were confirmed last week, both the highest weekly numbers this year. CDC physician Lee Tsung-han (李宗翰) said the youngest person hospitalized due to the disease this year was reported last week, a one-month-old baby, who does not
RSS