David Horovitz, in Jerusalem, analyses the implications of President Bush's landmark speech on the Middle East crisis.
Get Rid of your leaders. That is the not-so-subtle subtext for Israelis and Palestinians of President Bush's extraordinary White House address, delivered after another week of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel and an unprecedented Israeli military onslaught in the West Bank
After displaying apparent indifference for months to the rising level of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, Mr Bush has dropped an absolute bombshell. His White House speech on Thursday was received with jaw-dropping amazement among Israeli and Palestinian leaders - because they had been given no hint that it was coming, and because of its extraordinarily far-reaching implications.
Barely 24 hours earlier, the President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, had called on the United States to give up its key mediator's role in the region, since it had so clearly failed to broker a truce. But far from relinquishing the position of sole mediator, Mr Bush has now sketched out not just a ceasefire mission for his Secretary of State Colin Powell, who flies to the region in a few days' time, but a vision of a permanent peace accord between the two warring peoples.
Of course, Mr Bush did not come out and specifically call on Israelis and Palestinians to get rid of their leaders. But the parameters he set out for peace between them are quite plainly unacceptable to both the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - and the President knows this full well.
In the case of Mr Arafat, Mr Bush came very close indeed to explicitly demanding that he be ousted. He declared the PA president had "missed his opportunities and thereby betrayed the hopes of his people". He branded Mr Arafat a terrorist, accusing him of failing to honour his Oslo peace accord obligations to renounce and prevent terrorism, and urged "responsible Palestinian leaders" to "step forward and show the world they are truly on the side of peace".
Those comments amounted to the virtual sanctioning of Mr Arafat's murder, presumably by Israel, according to Hassan Asfour, one of many flabbergasted Palestinian Authority ministers. "What can President Arafat do [to fight terror]," wailed the former senior negotiator Saeb Erekat, "when Sharon is destroying our headquarters, our police installations, declaring us irrelevant while asking us to be accountable?"
The Arab world and Europe have been denouncing Israel for besieging Mr Arafat in a few square metres of his Ramallah headquarters and for encouraging him to submit to deportation, but President Bush was not in the least critical of that: "The situation in which he [Mr Arafat] finds himself today," he said curtly, "is largely of his own making."
There was nothing remotely as personally condemnatory in the President's comments about Mr Sharon. But here, too, he issued demands to which the hawkish Israeli Prime Minister could never accede. As a first priority, Mr Bush called for an end to the current, unprecedented Israeli military assault on the West Bank - ordered by Mr Sharon in response to a similarly unprecedented series of suicide bombings, which had been running at a rate of almost one a day. Mr Sharon's immediate response was that the operation would continue until "terrorism is defeated."
But the President also demanded, in setting out his hugely ambitious vision for Israeli and Palestinian states co-existing in neighbourly harmony, that the Israeli government halt settlement building in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. In contrast with his Labour party prime ministerial predecessor Ehud Barak, who offered peace terms to Mr Arafat at Camp David in July 2000 that would have involved dismantling almost all of the settlements, Mr Sharon, leader of the hard-line Likud party, is the veritable architect of West Bank settlement.
And Mr Bush went farther still. Israel, he indicated, had to put an end to its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem - "through withdrawal to secure and recognised boundaries consistent with UN Resolutions 242 and 338".
Now Mr Sharon may have moved some distance from his former position that the only true Palestinian state could be located in Jordan, and has actually endorsed Palestinian statehood in principle, in parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But it would be unthinkable for him to relinquish the entire occupied territories, as President Bush is now essentially proposing.
In their first responses to the President's speech, Mr Sharon's aides and ministerial colleagues concentrated on the White House call for an end to the West Bank re-invasion, and indicated privately that they were not too alarmed, especially as the President had not demanded an "immediate" withdrawal, and had apparently given Israel some leeway by scheduling Mr Powell's arrival only for the middle of next week. Sooner or later, however, if the Bush administration now genuinely resolves to re-involve itself in the region, a colossal confrontation looms between Mr Bush and Mr Sharon.
For the next few days, it appears, Israel will intensify its activities in the West Bank, attempting to track down as many as possible of the "terror kingpins" orchestrating suicide bombings - despite the bitterness this is fuelling among Palestinian civilians and the implications for its relations with its two Arab peace partners Egypt and Jordan, and notwithstanding the ever-present threat of the crisis escalating into regional war.
Mr Arafat, now exposed by Israel has having directly funded the murderous activities of such individuals as Raed Karmi (an Arafat loyalist who gave television interviews readily acknowledging that he dragged two Israelis out of a Tulkarm café and shot them dead last year, and who was himself killed later by Israel), will presumably continue to resist the Sharon invitation to voluntary exile, encourage Arab foreign ministers convening in Cairo today to issue the harshest warnings to Israel to withdraw, and contemplate the collapse of his Palestinian Authority, which has now essentially ceased to function.
All eyes will then turn to Mr Powell. His implicit, longer-term mission - if Mr Bush honestly intends to follow through on his address - is to oversee the replacement of Messrs Arafat and Sharon by leaders genuinely prepared to make peace.