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Contact: Barry Freedman, Executive Director

September 20, 2006

PRESIDENT BUSH AT THE UNITED NATIONS


Americans For a Safe Israel is deeply disappointed that President Bush, a strong supporter of Israel, once again endorsed a “two state solution” during his speech at the United Nations.


Herbert Zweibon, Chairman of the organization, stated: “By reviving the ‘road map,’ in spite of the unequivocal evidence that Israel has no ‘partner for peace,’ the President undercuts his own war against terror. The President ignores the fact that Hamas, now the elected government of the Palestinian Authority, is a terror organization openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction. And while the President rightly denounces the Holocaust-denying Ahmadinejad, why does he persist in praising and trying to shore up the Holocaust-denying Mahmoud Abbas?”


Zweibon notes that, “The road map is a map for Israeli territorial retreat. How can the President ignore what has followed Israeli retreats since the ‘road map’ was first proposed? Israel’s unilateral retreat from Gaza has produced only endless missile and rocket attacks upon her southern towns. Her unilateral retreat from Lebanon produced the onslaughts by Hezbollah. In simply repeating the slogans of a failed policy, the President is showing a lack of firm leadership, when leadership is sorely needed. It is especially distressing that the President should be making these statements at the deeply corrupt UN, that he should use this forum to gratify Israel’s enemies and encourage the jihadists.”


Americans For a Safe Israel is concerned at the failure of understanding and imagination that still permeates U.S. policy toward the Arab-Israel conflict. The State Department still seems to control policy and to advance the same tired formula, unchanged since the 1970 Rogers Plan calling for Israel’s retreat to the 1949 ceasefire lines.


“It is past time,” says Zweibon, “for the U.S. to abandon its ‘three-state’ solution, its effort to carve up historic Palestine into a Jewish state and two Arab states, Jordan, and a terror enclave in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, to be given the name of Palestine. It is time for the administration to recognize that the effect of adding the ‘third state’ it promotes would merely be to threaten the existence of the other two: both Jewish Palestine and Jordanian Arab Palestine.”