The plight of the Palestinians is the single most important issue to most Arabs. Professor Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland conducted a poll in which citizens of five nations -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates -- were asked how important the Palestinian issue was to them personally. In four nations, 60 percent said it was the most important. In Egypt, reviled throughout the Arab world as the state that made peace with Israel, 79 percent said it was.

Nor are such sentiments confined to the Middle East. In small anti-U.S. demonstrations Sunday in Rawalpindi, Pakistan -- the Muslim nation that is the key to our diplomatic and military efforts to apprehend bin Laden -- demonstrators chanted slogans attacking the U.S. over the Palestinian issue.

What does this have to do with America? Everything. It is difficult for Americans, thousands of miles away from a conflict for which they feel no responsibility, to realize how people in the Middle East -- indeed, in much of the Third World -- view us. For many, perhaps most Arabs -- including those in the moderate states, as well as that vast majority of the Arab world that is well disposed to the American people -- America is virtually indistinguishable from Israel. The bitter joke in the region is that Israel isn't a client state of the United States -- the United States is a client state of Israel. The refugees in the squalid camps in Gaza may not know that Israel is the primary recipient of our foreign aid, receiving $2 billion annually in military aid, but they know Israel could not do what it's doing without us. The jets that fire missiles into Palestinian buildings, the tanks and helicopter gunships that enforce Israeli control of the occupied territories in the West Bank and Gaza, might as well have big pictures of Uncle Sam painted on the side.

And people ask, "Why do they hate us?"

If this were a case of good vs. evil, the righteous Israelis fighting for their survival against the evil Arabs, it would be a cause worth America enduring the hatred of millions of people. But it is not. No one in the world, aside from some segment of the Israeli public and, apparently, the U.S. government, believes this. The Third World doesn't believe it. The United Nations doesn't believe it. Our European allies don't believe it. And most Americans don't believe it -- although in the horrifying spasm of mindless anti-Arab sentiment that is gripping the country now, who knows if that will continue to be true.

Let us be absolutely clear: if Israel is not a moral exemplar, neither are the Palestinians or the Arab states. There are no heroes and villains here. Nothing can condone the Palestinian terror attacks against Israel, any more than anything can condone the intransigence on both sides that has led to them. The day has long passed when anyone could seriously look at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as anything but a train wreck, a horrifying collision in which every noble impulse and belief immediately runs into its opposite.

A people persecuted for thousands of years, subject to the most horrifying act of genocide visited upon any group in human history, finally finds a homeland where they can be free -- only to discover that another group of people, with equal claim to the land, was already there.

Another impoverished and oppressed group of people, driven from their ancestral homes by an occupying force into wretched refugee camps, or left on the margins of the society created by that occupying force, turning in their desperation to religious fanaticism and suicidal violence.

On both sides, leaders without the courage to make peace. Decent men and women on both sides driven to hopelessness and hatred. And endless blood.

That is the situation. But it may still be possible to find a way out of this tragic deadlock -- if America has the courage to step in. Only the United States has the power to broker a deal that will provide lasting peace between Israel and Palestine. Hitherto, we have lacked the will to do so. Perhaps Tuesday's horrific events will provide the impetus to find that will.

Exactly what the final form of a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians should or will take is impossible to say. Nor is ultimate success assured. The hatred and mistrust is deeper than ever; perhaps a point of no return has been reached. But the effort must be made. And the crucial initial step is obvious, as it has been for many years: Israel must immediately stop building new settlements in the occupied territories.

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