A Handshake That Doesn't Help Israel
By David Ignatius
Friday, April 16, 2004
President Bush is on a roll in the Middle East . . . backward. His embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's positions on settlements and Palestinian refugees has needlessly squandered U.S. leverage in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
Bush supporters would argue that he has done no more than state the obvious: Some Israeli settlements will remain in the West Bank after any "final status" agreement, and Israel will never absorb within its own borders the Palestinian refugees who fled after 1948.
But Bush ignores the fact that there can be powerful reasons not to say the obvious -- and that studied ambiguity is an important part of successful diplomacy. That's why six previous administrations had resisted taking the step Bush did Wednesday and endorsing one side's positions in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. They wanted to preserve America's ability to act as a mediator, in part because they believed that role best served the interests of America's ally, Israel.
Bush is not a man for diplomatic ambiguity. He famously prefers to see things in simpler, black-or-white terms. In particular, he tends to view the world through the narrow and sometimes distorting prism of the war on
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