Marooned on his fantasy island, Bush stands firm
The lesson from Vietnam is to listen to the people on the ground

Anybody who has done some foreign reporting knows that the views of correspondents on the nature of the crisis or war which has brought them to a particular place tend to be similar. Day- to-day experience, constant discussion, and the weight of numbers produce a consensus which only a few resist. Thus most of the correspondents who covered Vietnam felt that the war was in some way wrong, a feeling reflected in their stories, and thus today most of the correspondents who cover the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians would agree that Sharon is more of an obstacle to peace than Arafat. The point here is that the consensus is multinational and, especially, that there is not that much divergence between Americans and non-Americans.

The picture painted for readers of, for example, the New York Times, Le Monde, or the Guardian by the reporters on the spot in Israel and the territories is in essentials the same. Comment, put together in the metropolis, is a very different matter, as are the stories reporting on the views and decisions of policy makers in capitals, above all Washington. But this argument from journalism on the ground is of interest because it contradicts the notion that an almost genetic difference can now be seen between Americans, as citizens of the imperial centre, and non-Americans, and it reminds us that we have been in similar situations in the past, long before anybody was talking of the single superpower. The difference it suggests is not that between Americans and everybody else but between the sensible conclusions of people on the spot and the overly abstract, unreal and sometimes fantastical conclusions of people in power.
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Zionism or colonialism?

It is generally accepted today that at this stage, the declared primary aim of Jewish settlement in the territories has already been achieved. As this was described by Hanoch Marmari in the heartfelt plea he published here two weeks ago (`You are sitting on the key,' Ha'aretz, June 14), it is the ideological settler who holds the key to our future. And indeed, if settlement is not ended once and for all by an unequivocal political decision and in the framework of a comprehensive peace agreement, Jewish settlement in the territories is a process that will continue until the last dunam of land in the West Bank is "redeemed," or until the last of the Arabs who refuses to accept the sentence of Jewish overlordship is thrown out. Thus, the war that has been imposed on us is an eternal war. Now, when settler leader Ze'ev Hever (Zambish) and his people have won allies like U.S. President George W. Bush and the Islamic terror people, each of whom in his own way and for his own reasons is positing unreasonable or insane conditions for ending the war, only the sky, in the West Bank, is the limit.
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With a victory like that

Ariel Sharon is ecstatic and it's not clear why. Bush's thirteen-and-a-half minute speech, which Sharon was looking forward to so eagerly, has not changed things one iota. We're still deep in the muck. The tourists aren't coming. The economy is going downhill. Companies are going bankrupt. Personal safety is a joke. Every day, there are dozens of alerts, especially for mega-bombings of tall buildings and strategic sites.

Without all the noise of Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF has now reoccupied most of the West Bank and a genuine war is being waged in Palestinian Authority territory. It may have been a heck of a speech, but Bush offered Sharon nothing: No light, no end, no tunnel.
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