Middle East ‘Turning Point’ Angers Palestinians

His former house is gone now and the old village is full of strangers, but 60-year-old Naim abu Aker still dreams of someday returning to the Arab farming town of his early childhood.

His determination is as unbending as the thick iron house keys he has kept for decades.

On Thursday, that resoluteness also carried a strong dose of anger as Aker reacted to news that President Bush had endorsed Israel’s position of refusing the return of Palestinians to former homes in what is now Israel.

“This is our land. You dig into this land and you find the bones of our ancestors, our grandparents who worked and died on the land,” Aker said during an interview in his home here in the Deheishe refugee camp.

The camp sits about 10 miles from his family’s former hometown, which was known by its Arabic name, Ras abu Amar, before the war that gave Israel statehood in 1948. Now it is a Jewish community with a Hebrew name: Tsur Hadassah.

“You cannot give it up,” said Aker, a furniture painter who was 4 when his family left Ras abu Amar amid nearby fighting in 1948.

From the crowded refugee camp here to the halls of their government, Palestinians expressed outrage and defiance after Bush’s pronouncements Wednesday during a meeting in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

During that session, Bush veered from long-standing U.S. policy in the Middle East by backing Israeli positions on a pair of crucial issues: Israel’s eventual right to annex parts of the West Bank that hold major Jewish settlements and denying Palestinians a “right of return” to lands in Israel, long a central concern of Palestinian negotiators.

Previously, U.S. policy had called for those matters to be settled through negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

Bush’s move came as part of an agreement under which the Israelis would pull out from the Gaza Strip and portions of the West Bank without seeking concessions from the Palestinians. Sharon has characterized the move as a way to reduce friction with the Palestinians and to ease Israel’s military burden by pulling back to more easily defended borders.

Although Palestinian leaders have said they welcomed Israel’s departure from areas it has occupied since the 1967 Middle East War, the Bush declaration appeared to catch them off-guard and left them for now with few desirable countermoves.

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Korei told reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah that Palestinian officials were “still evaluating the situation.” He brushed aside news reports that he was considering quitting in frustration over the news from Washington.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a member of the Palestinian Authority negotiating team, said officials were discussing “various options.”

“We believe it is a turning point, what happened yesterday,” he said. “There is a decision by the U.S. administration and the government of Israel to assassinate the peace process and to prevent any revival of this process in the future.”

Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath is to make his own trip to Washington next week for previously scheduled meetings with U.S. officials. The visit should yield some clarification on the new U.S. stance, but the Palestinians for now are appealing to other foreign governments for help.

“This is what it means to be under occupation. You have no power,” said Michael Tarazi, a lawyer who advises the Palestinian negotiating team. “This is the problem.”

Previous U.S.-backed peace initiatives reflected an assumption that Israel probably would emerge from negotiations holding some portion of the West Bank, home to about 125 Jewish settlements. Most residents live in a handful of large blocks close to the armistice line, drawn in 1949 after Israel gained independence, that has served as the basis for negotiations.

Bush said Wednesday that any final agreement must take into account that “realities on the ground and in the region have changed greatly over the last several decades.”

The Bush statement, which also rejected a resettlement of large numbers of Palestinians to Israel, boosted Sharon as he prepares to sell his withdrawal plan to members of his Likud Party before a referendum May 2.

The biggest-selling daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, declared in a headline Thursday: “Sharon Got Everything.”

A public-opinion poll published by Army Radio showed that 55% of Likud voters supported the plan, which calls for evacuating 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four others in the West Bank. About 60% said the Bush endorsement helped Sharon.

Israeli police officials warned of possible attacks by Palestinian militants angered by the Washington meeting. Late Thursday, the military said a Palestinian woman carrying a 50-pound bomb was arrested outside Ariel, a large Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

In other developments, Israeli Atty. Gen. Menachem Mazuz ordered government ministries to freeze payments to the Jewish councils overseeing all settlements to ensure that money is not used to establish illegal outposts, which are outgrowths of settlements often consisting of little more than a trailer and water tank. Under the U.S.-sponsored “road map” for peace, Israel is to halt new settlement construction and dismantle outposts built since March 2001.

Yuri Stern, a right-wing member of parliament, said Israel shouldn’t move “one toilet” in return for Bush’s support, and he accused Sharon of giving in to terrorism.

Also Thursday, fresh violence broke out in the Gaza Strip as an Israeli helicopter gunship fired a missile during a military raid in Rafah, wounding 20 Palestinians.

The army said its forces were searching for tunnels used to smuggle weapons across the border from Egypt.

Later in the day, an 18-year-old Palestinian man was killed by Israeli troops.

In Bethlehem, Naim abu Aker joined about 75 other men and boys in a march in part to protest the Bush-Sharon meeting.

Among the marchers was 81-year-old Ahmed Abdulrahman, who lives in another camp and clings to the vision of regaining his family’s farm in an Israeli town now called Beit Guvrin.

Leaning on a cane and squinting through one good eye, Abdulrahman said the Bush comments did not dampen his hopes, however remote a return to Israel was even before the summit.

“The declaration by Bush yesterday makes me feel that we need to fight for another 100 years,” he said. “It makes me more determined. I don’t have a choice.”