Bush goes John Hagee in Israel and ignores history

As if referring to the Jews as “chosen people” wasn’t enough gasoline to throw on the fire of Israeli-Palestinian relations, President Bush also said Palestine was a desert before the arrival of European Jews.

Does anybody in the White House, or better, anybody at the appropriate Cabinet department, who’s not a pure political hack, actually vet any of the man’s speeches?

And any U.S. presidential candidate who does not say that the right of return has to be a negotiable issue from the Israeli side has another reason he or she won’t be likely to get my vote.

Israeli Prime Minister Olmert knows that, by this point, many Palestinian Arabs don’t expect to get ancestral homes back, though some surely still would like to.

Instead, they want two things:
• Compensation;
• An acknowledgement of wrong.