This release by Americans for a Safe Israel was sent in response to the agreement and letters of intent between President Bush and Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon.

In response to the exchange of letters between Prime Minister Sharon and President Bush on April 14, Herbert Zweibon, Chairman of Americans For a Safe Israel/AFSI, asserts, “In order to shore up his flagging political fortunes, Israel’s Prime Minister has betrayed the Zionist principles on which he served the nation as general and on which he ran for public office.”

Zweibon continues, “President Bush, so resolute in Iraq, displays a double vision. With one eye he clearly sees that Arabs recently liberated from a murderous regime have turned their violence and primitive hatred to the very forces which attempt to bring stability and a better life to their country. With the other eye he has the “vision” of a democratic Palestinian Arab state accepting Israel, renouncing terrorism and living peacefully side by side with a Jewish state.

The paltry “victory” of keeping some of the Jewish towns of Judea and Samaria and refusing Palestinian Arabs the so-called right of return to Israel is mere gift-wrapping on a box of explosives.

There exists within the 1967 borders a large Arab population, which can easily be mobilized by the prospect of driving the Jews out. An Arab sovereignty in the high terrain of Judea and Samaria, fueled by jihad, supported and armed by all Arab nations, and encouraged by the entire Moslem world could easily overrun the remaining communities (reduced to "enclaves" by Sharon's retreat) and commence a deadly war against the Jewish state. In fact, with Gaza in Arab hands, Syria in control of the north, an enthusiastic partner in Egypt from the south, Israel will be caught in a pincer movement of Arab troops.”

AFSI’s chairman calls on all Israel’s supporters to denounce and reject this ill conceived and dangerous plan. "It abrogates Israel's patrimony and its historic rights. It glosses over the expulsion of 8,000 Jews who built their homes and livelihoods in Gaza at the behest of various Labor governments. The plan also calls for the expulsion of over 150,000 more Jews from Judea and Samaria, placing the state in existential danger. Every time Israel makes concessions, the result is an escalation of terrorism, flouted agreements, and more demands. The deadly results of Oslo should have set the bar, but utopians here and in Israel just keep moving the bar lower."