Bush misses the point...

He can pressure the Israelis all he wants...the real question, as Marty Peretz asks, is when the Jihad against Zion is going to stop...

Yet there are some realities that neither the American president nor the best laid plans of other mice and men can influence or affect. You can force this bloc of settlements (and almost of them) to close down and draw the border here rather than there and even color code Jerusalem to allow the Arabs to control the Temple Mount (which would be a terrible affront to Jewish history that the Muslims want especially to affront) and to hand sovereignty over Palestinian neighborhoods in the city to the Palestinians and contrive some cynical and unprecedented formula for allowing some "refugees" (they are almost all dead actually) to "return" and creating a fund for compensation of zillions of dollars (to which Israel should not contribute because it has absorbed since 1948 a larger number of true Jewish refugees from the Islamic world) and do much more...and yet none of this and not even all of this would end the jihad against Zion.

Near the end of their terms in office Ronald Reagan went down this road and Bill Clinton went down this road, too, and now George Bush is going down this road, as well. It is not out of malice towards Israel or even strategic callousness about its existential survival needs. Some of their eagerness might actually be an expression of their concern for and solidarity with Israel.

Yet no one will promise -- let alone assure -- that when (and if) Israel withdraws from 90% or 96% of the West Bank the land it has left will not be turned into platforms from which rockets and missiles are launched against the population centers of the Jewish state...and against strategic positions like Ben Gurion International Airport. What then will the next American president or the one after counsel the Israelis to give up?

The fact is that the great impediment to peace with Israel is the fanatic obstinacy of the Palestinians. Does anyone have a strategy for negotiating with that?