Lebanon's Hizbollah guerrilla group said today that US President George W. Bush 's Middle East
policy shift shows it is pointless to talk to Israel and leaves Arabs and Muslims no choice but resistance.
Changing decades of US policy, Bush on Wednesday backed plans by Israel to keep parts of the West Bank it has occupied since the 1967 Middle East war and bar Palestinian refugees from returning to homes in what is now Israel.
"We strongly reject these statements that we consider a new aggression on the Palestinian people and on Arabs and Muslims," Hizbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, said in a statement.
"We hope the American president's extreme positions will be a grave and bitter lesson to all those associated with the (peace) process, now that the illusions of a fair settlement and honest broker...have been shattered."
Bush 's move left the region with no choice but to insist on "resistance as the only means capable of breaking Israeli-American power and preventing it from controlling the fate of Palestine", the group said.
Hizbollah says its guerrilla attacks hastened Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 after 22 years of occupation and the group strongly supports a long-running Palestinian uprising.