Bush: I'll be back

Last update - 14:52 11/01/2008    

 

Bush leaves Israel with hopes for 'chances of peace' 

 

By News Agencies 

 

President Bush said Friday that he would return to the Mideast in May to continue pressing the Israelis and Palestinians into reaching a peace agreement and celebrate Israel's 60th anniversary.

 

"There's a good chance for peace and I want to help you," Bush said, flanked by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres at the airport outside Tel Aviv, where he boarded Air Force One, ending his visit to Israel and the Palestinian territories.

 

"Mr. Prime Minister and Mr. President, thank you very much for your invitation to come back. I'm accepting it now," Bush said on the tarmac.

 

Bush wrapped up his first presidential visit to Israel on Friday, visiting Jerusalem's official Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, and Christian holy sites in the north before departing for Kuwait, the next stop on his Middle East tour.

 

Bush arrived in Israel on Wednesday for talks with Israeli and Palestinians leaders as part of ongoing U.S. efforts to push the two sides into a peace agreement, following on from the regional peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland last November.

 

The U.S. leader summed up his visit Thursday evening by urging Israel to end its "occupation" of the Palestinian territories. He also expressed his belief that a viable peace deal could be reached by the end of his presidential term in January 2009.

 

Accompanied by Olmert and Peres, Bush earlier Friday toured Jerusalem's Yad Vashem memorial to the six million Jews killed in the Nazi Holocaust of World War Two, a traditional stop for foreign dignitaries visiting Israel.

 

During his visit, Bush said that the instititution serves as a reminder of the existence of evil in the world that needs to be resisted.

 

"I would hope if many people in the world would come to this place, it would be a sobering reminder that evil exists and a call that when we find evil, we must resist it," Bush said while at the memorial.

 

Wearing a black skullcap, he walked sombrely past photographs of victims. At a ceremony in the stark Hall of Remembrance, Bush rekindled an eternal flame and laid a wreath next to the names of death camps etched on a grey marble floor.

 

"I guess I came away with this impression, that I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God -- that in the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls, young and old, stood strong for what they believe, he said.

 

The Yad Vashem memorial was closed to the public and under heavy guard Friday, with armed soldiers standing on top of some of the site's monuments and a police helicopter and surveillance blimp hovering in the air overhead.

 

It was Bush's second visit to the Holocaust memorial, a regular stop on the visits of foreign dignitaries. His first was in 1998, as governor of Texas. The last U.S. president to visit was Bill Clinton in 1994.

 

At the compound, overlooking a forest on Jerusalem's outskirts, Bush was to visit the Museum of Holocaust Art and the Children's Memorial, and lay a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance.

 

Yad Vashem's director, Avner Shalev, was to present Bush with illustrations of the Bible drawn by the Jewish artist Carol Deutsch, who perished in the Holocaust.

 

Deutsch created the works while in hiding from the Nazis in Belgium. He was informed upon, and died in 1944 in the Buchenwald camp. After the war, his daughter Ingrid discovered that the Nazis had confiscated their furniture and valuables but had left behind a single item: a meticulously crafted wooden box adorned with a Star of David and a seven-branched menorah, containing a collection of 99 of the artist's illustrations of biblical scenes.

 

The originals are on display at Yad Vashem. The memorial recently decided to produce a special series of 500 replicas, the first of which was to be presented to Bush.

 

Debbie Deutsch-Berman, a Yad Vashem employee whose grandfather was Deutch's brother, said she was proud that Bush would be given her relative's artwork.

 

"These are not just his paintings, they are his legacy, and the fact that they survived shows that as much as our enemies tried to destroy the ideas that these paintings embody, they failed," she said.

 

Later Friday, Bush visited the site where Jesus is believed to have intoned "blessed are the peacemakers".

 

Near the hilltop where Christian faithful believe Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount, two robed Franciscan friars, one of them reading to Bush from the gospels, escorted the president to a jetty on the Sea of Galilee.

 

Asked what it was like to be walking in Jesus's footsteps, Bush replied: "It's an amazing experience."

 

Holding the hands of two nuns, a beaming Bush entered the Franciscan chapel on the Mount of Beatitudes, overlooking the ruins of Capernaum where Christians believe Jesus performed miracles.

 

He also toured the ruins of an ancient synagogue at Capernaum, or Kfar Nahum in Hebrew, where tradition says Saint Peter lived.

 

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