The Sunday Mirror
    U.S. endorsement of Israel

    HARARE, Zimbabwe � President George W. Bush last Wednesday broke with four decades of official U.S. diplomacy by endorsing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "disengagement" plan. He dispensed with the pretense that Washington is committed to a negotiated settlement of the Middle East conflict, and aligned the U.S. government publicly and unequivocally with Israeli aggression and the dispossession of the Palestinian people.
    The unilateral deal announced by Bush and Sharon calls for the dismantling of a relative handful of fortified Israeli enclaves in the Gaza Strip and evacuating some 7,500 settlers in return for the U.S. supporting Israel's "right" to permanently annex a vast portion of the West Bank territory that it seized in its 1967 war with neighboring Arab states. Zionist settlements in this territory house some 240,000.
    Palestinian representatives were summarily excluded from the talks leading to this illegal land grab; the announcement of the U.S.-Israeli deal was made in a manner that suggested the Palestinian people and their historic grievances do not even exist. The policies pursued by Washington and Israel are destabilizing the entire region and creating the conditions for revolutionary upheavals.