Ask any rabbi or community relations professional; in Jewish communities across the nation, there is support for the Bush administration\’s Iraq policy laced with healthy doses of skepticism and outright opposition — the whole range of reactions of a worried nation.
Ariel Sharon counts President Bush as a personal friend and a supporter of Israel, but signs indicate that Israel and the United States may be on a collision course over Middle East diplomacy.
If there is a collision in the offing, it may become apparent soon, because the Israeli prime minister and Bush will be meeting next week at theWhite House.
Monday\’s surprise announcement of the June 10 meeting comes as the Bush administration faces growing international pressure to produce a timetable and a detailed set of proposals for getting Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiating table and ending their conflict.
The Bush administration, determined to scale back U.S. Mideast involvement, is being drawn into the seething center of the conflict as Israeli-Palestinian confrontations rage.
But President George W. Bush and his foreign policy team, anxious to avoid the overinvolvement of their predecessors, are carefully calibrating their Mideast policies and pronouncements. The goal, according to sources here, is to make better use of the bully pulpit in Washington, while steering clear of day-to-day mediation.
Amid the bizarre string of foreign-policy fiascos in which Israelfound itself mired as it greeted the new year, surely none was quiteso bizarre as the case of runaway teenager Samuel Sheinbein ofMaryland.
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