US President George W. Bush yesterday arrived in Israel to cheer that country’s independence and celebrate Israeli democracy. He is also there to push forward the stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace talks.

Bush hailed Israel as an example to the region. One wonders which example, of the many fine examples Israel has set, Bush refers to. How to get rid of a pesky native population? How to create a democracy for 80 per cent of its people, based on their ethno-religious background, and present itself as a haven for progressive values? How to occupy neighbouring territory and people and blame the victims for their oppression?

Clearly oblivious to his own administration’s policies, he then said democratic reform was the way forward for this region and that Israel was showing the way.

Hamas showed the way as well, but let’s forget the fact that democracy means voting for “people like us” not “people like them.”

And so, blundering along, Bush hopes to push forward peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians. He comes not as one demanding anything of either side but, as he put it in a recent interview, “as one who encourages.”

Shame that, because if he wanted to be demanding, he would be on pretty solid ground. He could demand, for instance, that Israel adhere to international law, stop its illegal settlement building in occupied territory and clearly signal its intention to end its illegal occupation of foreign territory and assist in the creation of a Palestinian state.

He could demand that justice be rendered unto Palestinian refugees who, like all refugees, have a right to dignity, to property, to return if they so wish and to freedom… that’s a fine word that Bush uses so often.

He could demand all this and he could get his way. Israel, after all, cannot stand on its own two feet, even after 60 years, and needs US aid, the most given by any country to another, anywhere, ever, to survive.

Indeed, if Bush were thus demanding, he might go down in history as a “a guy who had principles and stuck by them”, rather than as the president who presided over the beginning of the next 60 years of conflict in the Middle East, even though the warning signs were there, clear and present.

Lucky, then, that Bush will meet Arab leaders in Egypt on Saturday, who, undoubtedly, will set him straight about what’s what.