The American Spectator

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Sharon's top advisor Dov Weisglass was more blunt about what he said -- and the American side immediately denied -- the quid pro quo was for a Gaza pullout.

"Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda," he told Haaretz. "And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress....The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."

IF BUSH WANTS TO SEE his Roadmap plan succeed, however, it might as well be openly said that the issue of allowing large blocs of Israeli settlements to remain on the West Bank is as much a non-starter as Palestinian demands for a right of return. The love affair with the settlements and Eretz Israel HaShlema must end and the settlers' gangster tactics and lust for the apocalypse must be denied. The vast majority of the Israeli people knows this, as does the world and the American president. It is now time the Israeli government recognizes that, whatever the negative consequences of disengagement, delaying a promised statehood now considered by themselves and the world as inevitable will only serve to add to their woes at home and abroad.

If the Gaza pullout should turn out to be a sleight of hand designed to subvert negotiations on West Bank settlements, this incredible opportunity brought on by the death of Arafat may have been for naught and the tragedy will seem all the more endless.

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