An odd and unhelpful thing
Peter Wehner served in the Bush White House for more than six years. During most of that time he was Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of Strategic Initiatives.
Today, Wehner took exception to President Bush's reference to Israeli "occupation" of the West Bank. He explained:
Invoking the word “occupation,” which Israeli leaders have also used, strikes me as an odd and unhelpful thing. The West Bank and Gaza, as well as the Sinai desert and Golan Heights, were lost in an Arab war of aggression against Israel–and yet the aggressor states took on the mantle of the aggrieved. This historical fact cannot be stressed often enough: Israel did not set out to conquer anything; it seized the land in a war of self-defense. And Israel ceded—at Camp David in 1979—more land in pursuit of peace than virtually any victor in history. Israel gave up more than 90 percent of the land, including oil-rich land, it won in a war in which it was not the aggressor state. Post-World War II Germany lost land compared to pre-World War II Germany—but Germans do not refer to that lost land as “occupied territory.” It lost the land in a war—and when you lose a war, you often lose land, and the claims on that land.
But with Bush's policy towards Israel having lapsed into incoherence, it's not surprising that his voculabury on the subject has become (to borrow Wehner's restrained words) odd and unhelpful.
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