Bush leaves Israel, ready to return

President George Bush ended the first leg of his Middle East visit today with a promise to return to continue pressing the Israelis and Palestinians into reaching a peace agreement.

“There’s a good chance for peace and I want to help you,” he said, flanked by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Israeli President Shimon Peres as he boarded Air Force One, after seeing Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Mr Bush now goes to Kuwait, the tiny oil-rich nation his father fought a war over and one of only two invited guests to ignore the Annapolis peace conference which Mr Bush hosted for the new US-backed peace talks.

During his two days of formal talks with Mr Olmert, Mr Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Mr Bush laid out US expectations, saying that the two sides needed to get serious talks started quickly. On his way to visit Sunni Arab allies, Mr Bush said he would ask them to reach out to the Jewish state.

“I carry with me a message of optimism about the possibilities of a peace treaty. I will share with them my thoughts about you and (Palestinian) President Abbas and the determination to work to see whether or not it’s possible to come up with a peace treaty.”

He had closed his round of talks yesterday with a with a summation of his main demands for a peace pact he said should be completed this year.

Although the goals and terms were not markedly different from past US statements, it was an unusually detailed list of benchmarks.

Mr Bush urged Israel to end its 40-year occupation of the West Bank and said a Palestinian state should be contiguous, a nod to Palestinian opposition to a state broken into pieces by Israeli settlements and military installations.

At the same time, Mr Bush came out on Israel’s side on two important issues, implying that major Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank should remain in Israeli hands in a final peace deal and that Palestinian refugees should not be resettled inside of Israel.