David Horovitz
in Jerusalem
Having enraged the Palestinian leadership by endorsing key Israeli positions on the future of West Bank settlements and Palestinian refugee rights, the Bush administration is now fighting an uphill battle to resurrect its credentials as an "honest broker" in any future Israeli-Palestinian peace effort.
The effort began almost immediately after President Bush had robustly endorsed Israeli Prime Minister Mr Ariel Sharon's "disengagement plan" at the White House on Wednesday, and will gather pace next week when the Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Mr Nabil Sha'ath and Jordan's King Abdullah are due in Washington for talks with senior administration officials.
Leading the damage-limitation bid is the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, who has been assiduously working the phones and giving interviews in the past two days, talking up the importance for the Palestinians of Mr Sharon's unprecedented readiness to evacuate all of Gaza's settlements and some in the West Bank.
"This is the beginning of a process" that could be immensely beneficial to the Palestinians, Mr Powell has stressed, insisting that Mr Bush has not pre-empted future negotiations on a permanent peace accord.
Although the president effectively ruled out a return to Israel for any Palestinian refugees, and backed border changes that would ultimately mean permanent control for Israel over some West Bank settlements, Mr Powell insisted that Mr Bush "did not endorse any settlements" and that the core issues of dispute could only be resolved between the Israelis and Palestinians themselves.
Mr Powell is also said to be pledging to help raise money to improve conditions in Gaza after the Israeli withdrawal, although Mr Bush has been quoted as having told Mr Sharon that he would not provide funding until he could be certain it would not "end up in (Yasser) Arafat's Swiss bank account".
Although the other members of the international peace-mediating quartet, the EU, UN and Russia, will want to help smooth over the differences with the US at a meeting scheduled for April 28th in Berlin, Palestinian leaders from Mr Arafat on down are making plain that they now regard the US as hopelessly biased towards Israel.
Much of the Palestinian public feels the same, and there were demonstrations against both Israel and the US in several West Bank and Gaza cities yesterday.
Moreover, for all Mr Powell's attempts at rebuilding bridges, Mr Bush is evidently disillusioned with Mr Arafat, and supported Mr Sharon so strongly because, he made plain, he considers that the Arafat-led Palestinian Authority condones, and in some cases encourages, terrorism.
Mr Powell is also limited in how much he can try to re-spin the Bush message because of the potential implications for Mr Sharon back home.
Mr Sharon published his disengagement plan in the Hebrew dailies yesterday, promising to leave all of Gaza except for a patrol road on the border with Egypt by the end of next year - and is determinedly highlighting Mr Bush's pro-Israeli positions as he battles to win a May 2nd referendum on the plan in his own Likud party.
Opinion polls yesterday gave him leads of 10 to 20 per cent among the 200,000 Likud members, but the 7,500 Gaza settlers and their supporters will do everything they can in the next two weeks to persuade Likud members, whose official party platform rules out Palestinian statehood, that Mr Sharon has gone soft and must be stopped.
The prime minister's son, Omri, also a member of the Knesset, is warning that Mr Sharon may resign if he loses the vote.
But that is less a threat than a promise for his more hawkish opponents.
A 17-year-old Palestinian was killed by Israeli troops near Ramallah yesterday, at a demonstration of hundreds of people against Israel's West Bank security barrier.
The Israeli army said he was throwing a petrol bomb at troops.
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, affiliated with Mr Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, said it planned a bombing foiled on Thursday in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
It said the Palestinian woman caught with the explosive device at the entrance to the settlement, a mother of six, was supposed to have given it to a male bomber.