US President George W. Bush enraged an Arab world already alienated by the Iraq war with his green light to Israel to keep some settlements on the West Bank, but the move may earn him favor with some Jewish and conservative Christian voters, analysts said.
Bush's radical shift in decades-old US policy toward the Middle East comes less than seven months before the November 2 presidential election, which, like the 2000 vote, is expected to be a close race.
Standing alongside Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Bush on Wednesday swept aside prior White House policy, including that of his father, George H.W. Bush, who even conditioned US bank guarantees for Israel to mark his opposition to Israeli settlements.
As well as supporting Sharon's plan to keep some West Bank settlements on land claimed by the Palestinians, Bush also ruled out a return of Palestinian refugees to what is now Israel.
The moves were welcomed by representatives of the 5.5 million-strong US Jewish community, which traditionally votes Democratic.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobby in Congress, described them as "an exemplary display of historic cooperation between two allies."
Jonathan Lincoln, a Middle East policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Bush may have earned some points with Jewish voters, whose support could prove critical in a tight contest in November.
"Certainly the image of an Israeli prime minister and a US president side by side, almost exactly the same on all the issues, is something that will resonate very strongly among the Jewish community in this country," Lincoln said.
"If you can sell an illusion of progress in Iraq and an illusion of progress on the Palestinian-Israeli front, then this is good for Bush going into November," he said.
David Winston, a pollster, told the Washington Post newspaper that Bush's policy change "is clearly going to generate some favorable reaction from people who have not been traditional Republican voters."
In breaking with past Middle East policy Bush may have recalled how Ronald Reagan once garnered the vote of 38 percent of the Jewish electorate, a figure which the incumbent could match according to a recent American Jewish Committee poll.
Bush only received 19 percent of the Jewish vote in the 2000 election.
Beyond siphoning off some of the Jewish vote, analysts said Bush's support for Sharon is also expected to go down well among pro-Israel conservative Christian voters, who number in the millions. Many of them oppose any territorial concessions by Israel.
Bush's rival in the race for the White House, Democrat John Kerry, conscious of the importance of the pro-Israel vote, was quick to comment positively on the president's moves.
"I think that could be a positive step," the Massachusetts senator said. "What's important, obviously, is the security of the state of Israel."
But while Bush may have won some ground from an electoral point of view, the moves provoked a furious reaction in the Arab world and beyond.
An editorial in The New York Times Thursday bluntly warned that Bush's policy shift will "compromise any subsequent attempts by Washington to broker a lasting settlement, to put it mildly."
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