Stardate 20020624.1704

(On Screen): I suspect a lot of people will treat today's speech by Bush about Israel and the Palestinians as being meaningless, unimportant, an empty gesture. I disagree; I think that it was extremely important in many regards.

It represents a fundamental change in American policy. Arafat is now officially out, as far as the US government is concerned. The US does not think that Arafat or the existing Palestinian Authority can be negotiated with in its current form, and does not think that it can be reformed. The policy of the US is now that a completely new government of the Palestinians will be needed with entirely new leaders.

There were token attempts at even-handedness, but the real undertone here is very clear: the first steps in this process must be taken by the Palestinians, and that must be to depose Arafat and stop attacking Israel.

The subtext in Bush's speech is clearly that the Palestinians are the aggressors and Israel is responding, and because of that the lives of Palestinians are being made intolerable:

It is untenable for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation. And the current situation offers no prospect that life will improve. Israeli citizens will continue to be victimized by terrorists, and so Israel will continue to defend herself, and the situation of the Palestinian people will grow more and more miserable.

What's clear from this is that Bush doesn't expect Israel to stop responding until the Palestinians stop attacking Israel. That appears again later in the speech:

As we make progress toward security, Israel forces need to withdraw fully to positions they held prior to Sept. 28, 2000. And consistent with the recommendations of the Mitchell committee, Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop.

There is the necessary condemnation of settlement-building (with which I agree) but note that he only expects Israeli withdrawal after there is "progress towards security", which is to say after the bombings end. By the same token, he says that Israel should stop holding onto tax revenue which is supposed to go the Palestinians, but only after the PA is reformed and is no longer corrupt:

And Israel should release frozen Palestinian revenues into honest, accountable hands.

In fact, ceasing expansion of the settlements is the only thing he actually directly demands from Israel; everything else he says he wants from Israel would be conditional on Palestinian actions.

On the other hand, the speech is full of statements of things that the Palestinians have to do in order for the US to support an independent state, and it's quite an impressive list. And unlike Israeli withdrawal, none of them are conditional on anything that Israel does. Bush clearly expects the Palestinians to move first.

Peace requires a new and different Palestinian leadership, so that a Palestinian state can be born. I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror.

And when the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors, the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state, whose borders and certain aspects of its sovereignty will be provisional until resolved as part of a final settlement in the Middle East.

A Palestinian state will never be created by terror. It will be built through reform. And reform must be more than cosmetic change or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions based on democracy, market economics and action against terrorism.

And the United States, along with others in the international community, will help the Palestinians organize and monitor fair, multi-party local elections by the end of the year with national elections to follow.

This can be read no other way: Arafat is through. As long as the Palestinians collectively permit Arafat to remain in power, the US will not lift a finger to try to improve the lot of Palestinians, and they'll continue to suffer. As long as the bombings continue, the US will not restrain Israel's military reprisals and the Palestinians will continue to suffer.

The US is through trying to give Palestinians concessions without response; that's failed too many times already. Palestinians are no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt, and from now on they must make the first act of faith. Otherwise the US will stand back and let Israel grind them into a powder.

No, not that far. I don't think the US will stand by and watch Israel commit genocide. But the point of this was to send a message to the Arabs and to the Palestinian people. And it's a critical one:

The United States is not going to force Israel to make unilateral concessions.

Palestinian foreign policy, and broader Arab initiatives for the last twenty years have all been designed to try to induce the US to stomp on Israel's government hard and force Israel to give in and give things away without getting anything in return. The US is the only outside power capable of doing this, for historical reasons,