Bush vows to support Israel against 'terror'
JERUSALEM (AFP) — Visiting US President George W. Bush vowed on Thursday to support Israel in battling "terror" groups as the nation marks its 60th anniversary still struggling to find peace with Arab neighbours.
"America stands with you in breaking up terrorist networks and denying the extremists sanctuary," Bush told the Israeli parliament.
He was loudly applauded during his address marking the 60 years since the creation of Israel, an event Palestinians commemorate as a "catastrophe."
Bush hailed what he called "unbreakable" ties between the United States and Israel, describing the Jewish state as a thriving democracy threatened by regional adversaries and their armed proxies.
"Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas will be defeated, as Muslims across the region recognise the emptiness of the terrorists' vision and the injustice of their cause," said Bush,on a five-day tour of the region that will also take him to Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Bush warned that allowing arch-foe Iran -- whose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Israel should be wiped off the map -- to obtain nuclear weapons would be "an unforgivable betrayal of future generations."
He praised Israel as a thriving democracy and a model for the region.
"We consider it a source of shame that the United Nations routinely passes more human rights resolutions against the freest democracy in the Middle East than any other nation in the world," he added.
He addressed the Knesset one day after a rocket fired by militants in the Gaza Strip slammed into a crowded mall in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, wounding 14 people.
His visit also came against a backdrop of deadly turmoil in Lebanon after the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah militant group battled pro-government forces in days of fierce sectarian fighting.
Bush hoped to encourage Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, but the timing of his trip has angered Palestinians who marked Israel's 60 years by remembering the 1948 exodus of some 760,000 Arabs after the birth of the state.
Thousands of Palestinians joined rallies in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank to commemorate what they call the Naqba, or "catastrophe."
Activists released 21,915 black balloons -- one for each day since Israel's creation -- to darken the skies over several cities ahead of Bush's speech.
"On this good and beloved land live two peoples. One celebrates its independence and the other grieves in the commemoration of its Naqba," moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas said in a televised address.
Israeli Arab parliamentarians boycotted the Knesset session although three showed up holding photographs of dead Palestinian and Iraqi children and a banner proclaiming: "We shall overcome."
Bush talked only in broad terms about the Middle East peace process he helped to relaunch in November but which has failed to make much headway since.
He said he hoped that by Israel's 120th anniversary the Palestinians "will have the homeland they have long dreamed of and deserved -- a democratic state that is governed by law, respects human rights, and rejects terror."
Bush was scheduled to hold closed-door talks with Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who is now the representative of the Middle East Quartet comprising the US, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations.
The US president's visit came amid renewed confrontations, with Israeli officials warning that the military stands ready to launch a major operation in Gaza.
Two smaller Palestinian armed groups claimed Wednesday's rocket attack on Ashkelon, but Israel says Hamas is to blame since it controls Gaza, where the Islamists ousted troops loyal to Abbas in June last year.
Israel has carried out repeated military operations against Gaza in a bid to halt the almost daily rocket fire from the impoverished sliver of land.
Israel and Palestinian militants have talked separately to Egyptian mediators about a possible truce, but Hamas has rejected Israel's demand that it free a soldier captured by militant groups almost two years ago.
Bush was scheduled to visit a Jerusalem museum that traces the region's biblical history on Friday morning before flying to Saudi Arabia to commemorate the 75th anniversary of formal US-Saudi relations.
