Recipe for terror

Gerald Kaufman attacks Bush for supporting Ariel Sharon’s ‘disengagement’ plan, which, he says, will inevitably result in more Israeli deaths

One morning this week I got into conversation with a smartly dressed, middle-aged woman at the 274 bus stop in St John’s Wood. She told me that she was having an apartment built in Israel and that her daughter, on aliyah (the Hebrew word for immigration to the Holy Land), was a doctor in Jerusalem.

This nice lady told me, ‘I would defend Israel with my last breath.’ So, it might be thought: here was exactly the kind of person who would have been delighted by last week’s accord between the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Israel at the White House in Washington and who, though a peaceable soul, would not have been displeased by the death in Gaza of the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Ratissi, whose murder was authorised as soon as Sharon got back from the US.