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.
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