Last week's speech to the Israeli Knesset suggests that he has

By JEFF EMANUEL
May 20, 2008

Last Thursday, President Bush marked the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel by speaking to the country's governing body, the Knesset. In his address, Bush sounded like a different man from the one who called Israel an "occupying force" at the Annapolis Conference on Palestinian Statehood last November, and demanded that the middle east's lone functioning democracy make unilateral concessions to its terrorist enemies as a show of "good faith."

Perhaps in hopes of bolstering his legacy by pushing the region toward a peace more lasting than any of his predecessors has been able to achieve, Bush invited Israel, the Fatah leadership of the Palestinian West Bank, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and other regional players to the conference, and asked them to put their differences aside in order to work toward the best possible outcome for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

The fact that the meeting took place at all was a demonstration of the administration's willingness to subjugate consistency and the keeping of its word to the fleeting hope of achieving a boost in ephemeral legacy -- for, in order to attract any states other than Israel to the meeting, the administration had to willingly drop several previously-required stipulations, including the most basic: that attendees simply recognize that Israel had a right to exist in the first place.

Not only was that most basic of requirements waived for attendance at the Annapolis, but President Bush used his address at the conference to betray not only his own word, but Israel's rights as the besieged lone free country in the region as well.

The Israelis "must show the world that they are ready to begin" working toward peace, said Bush, by "bringing an end to the occupation that began in 1967 through a negotiated settlement." Mr. Bush's call for Israel to retract its borders to the indefensible 1949 armistice line not only served as a demand that Israel almost completely compromise its ability to defend its civilian population from attack; further, with this statement, Bush directly contradicted his 2001 promise to Israeli Prime Minister Arial Sharon that such a demand would never be made of the Jewish state.

By making that demand in his speech at Annapolis, President Bush put to rest any hope among supporters of the Jewish state that he would keep his promise to the former Prime Minister, and would support Israel’s right to defensible borders against the threats to their north, east, and south. Instead, encouraged by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Bush decided to ignore his letter to Sharon (as well as his 2001 promise that the Israeli concessions proposed by President Clinton in 2000 were "off the table"), and, echoing the language used by Israel’s enemies in the region, demanded that “occupation” be ended and the state’s borders be shrunk far past a defensible minimum simply as a starting point for peace negotiations -- without, again, even requiring the other parties at the meeting to so much as acknowledge Israel's right to exist at all.

Going forward from Annapolis, the "peace process" in the Levant has seen no progress. Israel, the lone free and successful nation in a region known for the opposite, still stands, a City on a Hill shining its light into a barren land, while those who would see it destroyed make their daily threats, and fire their rockets into its civilian towns. To the south, Hamas continues to wage its low-intensity war against the state to its north, with its fighters tearing up water pipes and firing them into the southern Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon, as well as at the Israeli power plant that supplies much of its electricity -- then proceeds to complain to all who will listen about its lack of infrastructure. To the north, Hezbollah has reasserted its position of nongovernmental dominance in Lebanon, and continues to use the platform there to launch attacks to the south and to the east, where the U.S. continues to labor in hopes of pacifying and leaving free the country of Iraq.

Farther to the east is Iran, whose leaders continue to fight a proxy war against both Israel and Iraq,while being ever more vocal about the "coming end" of the "stinking corpse" that is the country that they refer to as the "Zionist entity."
 
The President Bush who addressed the Israeli Knesset last Thursday appeared to be far more in touch with the reality of the middle east than the man who was lost in the temporary, disorienting fog that last fall's consideration of legacy seemed to have induced. Rather than calling on Israel to make unilateral concessions to those who call daily for a genocide that would result in its citizens' extermination, Bush praised Israel's strong national defense. Rather than spending his time talking about the Palestinian people's “many gifts and talents,” or echoing Dr. Rice's repeated assertions that those same Palestinians who shower Israel with daily rocket attacks want the same things that both Americans and Israelis want for their own lives and children, Bush warned against any attempts to "explain away" the murderous words and actions of Hamas, Hezbollah, and their ilk, saying:

[T]he founding charter of Hamas calls for the "elimination" of Israel. ...[T]he followers of Hezbollah chant "Death to Israel, Death to America!" That is why Osama bin Laden teaches that "the killing of Jews and Americans is one of the biggest duties." ...[T]he President of Iran dreams of returning the Middle East to the Middle Ages and calls for Israel to be wiped off the map.

There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn responsibility to take these words seriously. Jews and Americans have seen the consequences of disregarding the words of leaders who espouse hatred. And that is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Bush's speech contained many more statements and warnings that seemed to show that he had learned his lesson from the failure of the Annapolis appeasement conference to provoke real results in the region, and seemed to signal a very public return to a view of foreign policy that is far more in touch with reality than was the one the fueled the legacy-minded approach last November. He pulled no punches in his verbal condemnation of Israel's enemies, refusing even to spare the United Nations from criticism. "We believe that democracy is the only way to ensure human rights," he said. "So we consider it a source of shame that the United Nations routinely passes more human rights resolutions against the freest democracy in the Middle East than any other nation in the world."

Above all, President Bush used his platform at the Knesset to warn against attempts to appease those who cannot be reasoned with"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals," he said, "as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along."

He continued:

We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

That "false comfort of appeasement" has been "discredited," as President Bush put it, as recently as last fall, when Mr. Bush and Dr. Rice's attempt to purchase a middle eastern peace at the expense of Israel's security went nowhere.

With this address at the Israeli Knesset, Mr. Bush appears to have learned his lesson, and to have returned to his rightful place, vis-a-vis Israel, in the pantheon of American presidents: one of the more stalwart supporters that the Jewish state has had, and the leader of the greatest international ally that Israel could hope for.

We can only hope, both for America's sake and for that of Israel, that Mr. Bush has indeed found his way, and will not become lost again.