KUWAIT CITY President Bush departed Israel today with a promise to return in May to celebrate the Jewish state’s 60th anniversary and continue pushing the Israelis and Palestinians towards a peace agreement by the end of this year.
“Thank you very much for the invitation to come back … I’m accepting it now,” Mr. Bush told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres, during a departure ceremony at Ben Gurion International Aiport in Tel Aviv.
Mr. Bush culminated his three-day trip to Israel with a visit to a Holocaust museum that moved him to tears, and to holy Christian sites in the northern city of Galilee that he said were “awe-inspiring.”
He then flew to Kuwait, the second leg of his six-country jaunt through the Middle East, where he will press Arab countries to recognize Israel for the sake of the peace process, support the fledgling Iraqi government, and unite in opposition to Iran.
Aboard Air Force One, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters she thinks Mr. Bush’s return to Israel in May will keep the peace process on track.”It’s always good to have the parties know that the president is coming,” Ms. Rice said. “That really gives them an incentive to move forward.”
Mr. Rice also described, with greater clarity than either the president or his national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley have so far, the Bush administration’s strategy on the peace process.
The road map for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop the continuation of terrorist attacks.
That meant every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discusing the core issues: the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel’s border, and the future of Jerusalem.
The reason that we haven’t really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status, Ms. Rice said.
Ms. Rice said that what the U.S.-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was break that tight sequentiality … to say, you can do these in parallel, you can do road map obligations and negotiation for the final status in parallel.
You don’t want people to get hung up on settlement activity or the fact that the Palestinians haven’t fully been able to deal with the terrorist infrastructure and prevent that from moving forward on the negotiations, she said.
Negotiating the core issues, Ms. Rice said, brings force and power … status to help people really pay attention to their road map obligations, and that’s what we’ve needed.
Upon his arrival in Kuwait, Mr. Bush met with Amir Sabah IV Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, the ruler of the small but oil-rich gulf state which was rescued in 1991 by Mr. Bush’s father, President H.W. Bush, after Iraqi Dictator Saddam Hussein invaded.
The two leaders discussed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, as well as the Iraq war and Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons.
Tomorrow, Mr. Bush will meet at Camp Arifjan with Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker.
After the meeting, Mr. Bush will speak to U.S. troops at the vast military base, which holds about 9,000 soldiers. It is located 45 minutes south of the Kuwaiti capital and has replaced Camp Doha as the main U.S. supply base in Iraq’s southern neighbor.
Before leaving Israel, Mr. Bush, who is traveling without his wife, First Lady Laura Bush, visited a Holocaust museum called Yad Vashem. The museum’s chairman, Avner Shalev, said he saw the president tear up twice.
Mr. Bush then went to the Sea of Galilee and saw where Jesus walked on water and calmed the storm, and the hillside where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
A group of nuns from the Church of the Beattitudes presented Mr. Bush with a plaque that bore a line from the famous sermon: “Blessed are those who are peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
Mr. Bush called his last day in Israel “a very emotional day and said it was “awe-inspiring to walk where Jesus lived and preached.”
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