The President Pushes the Peace Process

As President Bush arrives in Israel to push the “peace process,” Stephen Erlanger has a lengthy article in today’s New York Times portraying life in Sderot:

Sderot, a working-class town of mainly North African immigrants less than two miles from Gaza, has been hit over the past four years with some 2,000 rockets of improving range and explosive power — 22 in the last eight days. Eight Sderot civilians have been killed by the rockets; [13-year old] Razi [Sasson] has seen 15 therapists.

“He wouldn’t leave the house to go to school for a year,” said his mother, Shula. One of his older brothers, Rafi, 22, used his army exit pay to build Razi a bomb shelter in the living room, a concrete cocoon with a steel door. . . .

For many Israelis, Sderot (pronounced stay-ROTE) embodies the fears of what happens when they pulled back from occupied land, as they did from all of Gaza more than two years ago — it turns into a staging ground for attacks by extremist Palestinians that a peace treaty will not stop.

“When Bush comes, he should come to Sderot,” said Razi’s father, Moshe, 49, who works as a prison warden in Beersheba.

The problems of Sderot — and of a Gaza run by Hamas, considered a terrorist group by Israel and the United States — are at the heart of srael’s security concerns. But those concerns, like Hamas itself, are present only in the abstract in the American-led peace effort . . . .

After Israel turned over all of Gaza, dismantled every settlement, and withdrew every Jew — in order to give the Palestinians the chance to live “side by side, in peace and security”(TM) — Sderot turned into a place that was not safe for peace processors to visit.

There ought to be a rule that, before peace processors move on to their next project, they have to visit the results of the last one.

And then live in it while working on their plans to try it again.

See also “Reality Check:  Bush in Jerusalem,” “A Briefing for the President,” and “The Peace Planners Strike Again.”  All of them worth reading in their entirety.

As is, unfortunately, “As an American.”