If the U.S. wants peace, George Bush is going to have to summon the courage that allowed his father to stand up to the American friends of Israel's right wing. In 1991 that meant demanding a settlement freeze, but in 2002 that will mean support for an international intervention to separate and protect the two sides from each other and to impose a settlement which minimally requires an end to the occupation and the settlements, reparations for the Palestinian refugees (and to Israelis who fled Arab lands), as well as an end to the terror. One way to reassure legitimate Israeli fears: offer Israel membership in NATO or a mutual defense pact with the U.S. to guarantee protection from assault by neighboring states.

But there is only one path to mobilize Palestinians to join in a serious effort to crush Hamas and other fundamentalist terrorists, and that is for the Palestinian people to feel Israel has had a fundamental change of heart and is now ready to treat the Palestinian people with the same respect and sensitivity to their needs and their fears that we Jews rightly demand for ourselves. And that will never happen as long as we punish an entire people for the outrageous acts of a few. In my view, both sides need to do real teshuva-repentance for the terrible cruelty and pain each has unnecessarily inflicted on the other. But in the actual reality of Israel's far superior military power, it must be the more powerful force that starts this process without demanding that it be reassured from the start that the other side will reciprocate. If the Jewish people were to not only end the occupation and provide reparations, but also do it in a way that demonstrated real repentance, and we kept up an attitude of generosity and open-heartedness for many years, the justifiable Palestinian rage would eventually melt enough so that most Palestinians would be willing to stop, villify, and imprison those (and there are certain to be some) who will want to keep up violence no matter what Israel does. This is the only way to isolate the fundamentalists-every other approach guarantees their survival and future acts of terror.

Bush's vague promises of a state without territory, and without protection from further Israeli incursions, and one conditional on overthrowing Arafat and stopping all violence, is a non-starter-except perhaps as a temporary respite of pressure from the Saudis, who may use the Bush speech as a pretext to claim that the U.S. has demonstrated good intentions, and therefore deserves the go-ahead for U.S.'s desired war against Iraq. But for those of us who want peace and reconciliation in the Middle East, George Bush never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

All the more reason why we need to build a social movement capable of pushing U.S. policy in a different direction. We call it The Tikkun Community-and our goal is to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, a movement that calls for both a new social policy and a new spirit of compassion and generosity.