Bush vows to return for Israeli anniversary

KUWAIT CITY — President Bush, who welled with tears yesterday at Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and laughed with nuns at the hillside where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, promised to return to the Jewish state in May to celebrate its 60th anniversary.

Mr. Bush culminated his three-day trip to Israel, where he pushed Israelis and Palestinians to reach a peace agreement by year’s end, with “awe-inspiring” visits to holy Christian sites in the northern city of Galilee and a somber visit to the Yad Vashem at which he said the U.S. should have bombed Auschwitz.

Avner Shalev, chairman of the Yad Vashem’s memorial and museum, said tears came to Mr. Bush’s eyes twice, once when he was viewing an aerial photo of Auschwitz, the Nazi Germany death camp where between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed.

Earlier, Mr. Bush visited the Sea of Galilee and saw where the Bible says Jesus walked on water and calmed a storm, and the president accepted from nuns at the Church of the Beatitudes a plaque that bore a line from the famous sermon: “Blessed are those who are peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

“I came as a pilgrim,” Mr. Bush responded when Archbishop Elias Shakur, the Greek Catholic clergyman who showed Mr. Bush around the site, asked whether he came as a politician or pilgrim.

Mr. Bush called his last day in Israel “a very emotional day” and said it was “awe-inspiring to walk where Jesus lived and preached.”

“Thank you very much for the invitation to come back … I’m accepting it now,” Mr. Bush told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres, during a departure ceremony at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv.

The president then flew to Kuwait, the second leg of his six-country trip through the Middle East, where he will press Arab countries to recognize Israel for the sake of the peace process, support the fledgling Iraqi government and unite in opposition to Iran.

Aboard Air Force One, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters that she thinks Mr. Bush’s return to Israel in May will keep the peace process on track, and she made it clear that Mr. Bush meant the U.S. should have bombed the rail lines leading to Auschwitz.

“It’s always good to have the parties know that the president is coming,” Miss Rice said. “That really gives them an incentive to move forward.”

Miss Rice also described, with greater clarity than either the president or National Security Adviser Stephen J. Hadley have so far, the Bush administration’s strategy on the peace process.

The “road map” for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks.

As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the “core issues”: the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the rights of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel’s border and the future of Jerusalem.

“The reason that we haven’t really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status,” Miss Rice said.

Miss Rice said that what the U.S.-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was “break that tight sequentiality … to say, you can do these in parallel, you can do road-map obligations and negotiation for the final status in parallel.”

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