MER - Bush to visit an ambivalent Israel

<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"> No recent president has been less involved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations than Bush. But more explicitly than his predecessors, Bush has accepted the permanence of the biggest Jewish settlement clusters in the West Bank and opposed a massive return of Palestinian refugees to Israel. He supports the Israeli army's vigorous pursuit of militants in the Palestinian territories and Israel's construction, now nearly complete, of a barrier between its territory and the West Bank. <br> <b on></b> </body>