U.S. President George W. Bush in an interview with Al-Ahram published Friday backed off his otherwise strongly supported "road map" and said that keeping the promise of a Palestinian state by 2005 "may be hard." No new timetable was given.

President Bush must have found it hard to retract his promise, especially as he often prides himself for being the first US President to publicly call for a Palestinian state, but then again he also was the first President to publicly “relinquish” Palestinian rights as enshrined in UN resolutions 242 and 338.

Again it is impossible to disagree with the President; the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005 will definitely be difficult.

The creation will be difficult primarily because the President’s own “unilateral” relinquishment of Palestinian rights, such as the right of return of 4.6 million Palestinians (refugees who were uprooted, dispossessed, and displaced in 1948) or the Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines, cannot possibly help the Palestinians in any negotiations with Israel or be an incentive for Israel to resume negotiations, but just the contrary.

The creation of a Palestinian state will continue to be made difficult, as long as the US President fails to see how his assurances to Israel, as expressed in his April 14th letter, are inconsistent with his otherwise purported strong support for the “Road Map,” and how his assurances served only as a reward and license for Israel’s continued actions in the Palestinian occupied territories.

The creation of a Palestinian state is also made difficult by the President’s glaring bias for Mr. Sharon, a “man of peace” according to the President despite Sharon’s record in Lebanon and elsewhere that suggests otherwise, while simultaneously continuing with a near-to vilification process of Yasser Arafat, the elected President of the PNA.

The exclusion of Arafat and the insistence of change in Palestinian leadership as a precondition to the creation of a Palestinian state can only serve to sabotage the process. Palestinians, whether supporters or critics of Arafat, cannot accept US or Israeli attempts to disqualify the elected Palestinian leadership to suit the latters policies.

The creation of the state is also made difficult by this and previous administrations’ need to satisfy their pro-Israeli constituents, who constitute a real threat to the creation of any Palestinian state.
The US President's lacking courage to act according to what is right and just elsewhere, compounded by his eagerness to exploit his exposure with the Israeli leader for electoral benefits, shows where the courageous and bold leadership Bush so often talks about is really missing.

The creation of a Palestinian state is being made even more difficult with the US's tacit approcal of Israel's separation wall that continues to cut through the occupied territories, effectively expropriating much needed land and disconnecting evermore Palestinian families and communities.

The latest plans for a similar wall to cut through Gaza to serve some 7500 settlers and further disbanding 1.3 million Palestinians is just the latest addition to Sharon’s “unilateral disengagement” plan, which President Bush described as pre-cursor to the resumption of the peace process.

The creation of a state will be especially difficult as long as President Bush, the supposedly honest mediator, finds no contradiction between his call for a two state solution that is based on the establishment of a Palestinian “viable, contiguous, sovereign, and independent,” state and the actual developments on the ground as executed by Israel.

Actually, the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005 is not just difficult Mr. President, it is impossible.
May be the whole promise of a Palestinian state was just meant to sedate Palestinians in the first place, until at least more facts are established on the ground and the separation wall completed, thus rendering the whole issue irrelevant.