Analysis: Mr Bush has significantly altered the US position on the Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, writes David Horovitz in Jerusalem.
It amounted to little short of a campaign rally on behalf of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, marvelled Israel television's Washington correspondent, immediately after witnessing President Bush's joint press conference with Mr Sharon at the White House yesterday.
"The president did everything short of flying to Israel and knocking on voters' doors."
The correspondent was right, and it was a campaign rally that may have implications far beyond any immediate political campaign.
The voters Mr Bush was trying to win over immediately are members of Mr Sharon's own Likud party, all 200,000 of whom are to participate in a May 2nd referendum on the prime minister's plan for a complete Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and a pull-out from a small portion of the West Bank.
Prior to yesterday's White House event, the hardline Likud members who oppose the plan, several ministers amongst them, felt they had a good chance of defeating the initiative, and possibly bringing down the prime minister in the process. In the wake of Mr Bush's statement of a significantly altered American position on a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, the pro-Sharon camp is ecstatic, and the opponents far less optimistic.
Gloomiest of all, however, is the Palestinian leadership. Earlier this month, an American administration delegation visited the region and held talks with Israeli and Palestinian officials.
Mr Sharon and his colleagues made plain then their desire that yesterday's White House talks culminate not merely in a public presidential endorsement of Mr Sharon disengagement plan, but in wider American commitments to Israel on two vital issues - a public pledge that Israel would not be expected to absorb Palestinian refugees into its sovereign territory under a permanent accord, and that it would not be expected, either, to withdraw from the entire West Bank, back to its pre-1967 borders. Palestinian Authority, officials by contrast, urged that no such commitments be made - that the president issue no guarantees that might pre-judge the nature of a permanent peace agreement.
At the White House yesterday, most of the Israeli hopes were realised, and most of the Palestinian ones dashed.
While the president specifically asserted that his administration would not seek to prejudice the outcome of any negotiations on a final peace deal - and remarked wistfully that he was looking forward to the moment when such talks might actually be held - his positions do represent both a shift and a pre-judgement of a final accord in the two crucial areas.
Using wording that had been painstakingly crafted, he made clear that the US envisaged Palestinian refugees making their homes in Palestine "rather" than in Israel - an explicit rejection of the Palestinian demand, upheld by Palestinian Authority President, Yasser Arafat, at the failed Camp David 2000 talks, for a "right of return" to sovereign Israel for up to four million Palestinians.
Equally, the president spoke of the changing demographic realities over recent decades, and the establishment of "major Israeli population centres", which he said meant it would be "unrealistic" for Israel to have to return to its pre-1967 borders. In essence, President Bush was providing formal American endorsement for the eventual Israeli annexation of some of the larger West Bank settlements.
In truth, Mr Bush's predecessor, President Clinton, had indicated, in his mediation efforts, that the Palestinians should not seek a right of return to Israel, and that Israel should be able to expand sovereignty to encompass some settlements provided the Palestinians were offered slices of Israeli sovereign territory in return. But those Clinton proposals came as the president was attempting to get the sides to do a deal at the peace table; they were not issued as formal presidential positions.
Hours before yesterday's Bush-Sharon meeting, a statement issued by Mr Arafat had warned that American legitimisation of settlements, and rejection of the right of return, would spell the end of the peace process, the demise of all previous agreements and a return to the cycle of violence.
The enduring tragedy of course, is that, whatever the word from the White House, there is no peace process, previous agreements have long since been rendered irrelevant, and brutal violence is already the norm.