Word: palestinians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Peace in the Middle East has proved to be unusually elusive. Since the establishment of Israel in 1948, the region has been devastated by three major wars and numerous insurgencies on what are today Palestinian territories known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The efforts of many U.S. presidents and several supposed breakthroughs have proved fruitless. This millennium, the prospects for peace have seemed unusually bleak: More than a thousand Israelis have been killed as a direct result of the terrorist tactics employed by Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian groups since 2000, while Israeli counterattacks and military operations...
...venturing into the Palestinian West Bank was another matter. Palestinian militants are no friends to Bush, who is viewed as fervently pro-Israeli and a "vampire" out to suck Muslim blood. Nor did it help that an al-Qaeda member - a Jewish American convert to Islam - had issued a communique urging Muslims to greet the President "not with roses and applause, but with bombs and booby-traps...
...safest way would have been for Bush to fly on one of two U.S. Chinook helicopters to cover the short distance from Jerusalem to the Palestinian headquarters of President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah. But fog rolled into the Judean hills on Thursday, grounding the Chinooks. Instead, Bush set off by road in his serpentine 45-car motorcade riding in one of many identical bomb-proof limousines. The convoy sped by refugee camps and bounced over potholed roads to Abbas's compound. Meanwhile, a senior Israeli police official told TIME that Israel Special Forces and an emergency medical team were...
Working with Abbas's own security force, the American advance team cased out houses around the Muqataa compound where the two leaders would meet. Palestinian police arrested more than 300 militants belonging to Hamas and Islamic Jihad. One Israeli police official said that the American delegation, fearing that a bomb might be hidden in the table or chairs where Bush and Abbas were talking, decided to bring their own furniture from Washington. On the day itself, Palestinian soldiers lined the roads and closed off traffic...
...including the wife of TIME correspondent Jamil Hamad, were forbidden by soldiers to glance out the window of their own homes. At Manger Square, in front of Jesus' birthplace, American security experts were spotted prying up manholes to check sewage pipes for bombs. These draconian security precautions prompted one Palestinian official, who opposes his own President's close ties with Bush, to comment: "What's all this fear? Is it because the Americans and Palestinians running this show know they're doing something wrong...