Sharon's recruiting call. (Comment).

The Bush Administration has paid dearly for its inept policy in the Middle East. During its first eight months in office, it disengaged from the region. Then, after September 11, it sided entirely with Ariel Sharon. This gave him a green light to go on the offensive after the unconscionable suicide bombings. George W. Bush and Colin Powell proceeded to muffle criticism of Sharon in the early days of the invasion. As a result, Israel escalated its attacks, and the Arab world predictably erupted.

Riots wracked Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, and the followers of Osama bin Laden rejoiced. Irredentism is on the rise, with members of both sides staking spurious historical or religious claims to the whole land, and denying the other party any validity. Thus Sharon calls Palestinians "savages," and William Safire prays, "Next year in an undivided Jerusalem," while some Palestinians indulge the fifty-year fantasy of pushing Israel into the sea.

The Bush Administration modulated its response only after its Arab allies drove home the point that their very stability was at stake, and that if Washington had any hopes of getting them on board for the upcoming war against Iraq, then it needed to call for a halt to the invasion. Dick Cheney and Karl Rove also realized that rising oil prices, spiked by the conflict, would not help Republican chances in the fall of reclaiming the Senate and keeping the House.

The unprincipled factors behind the tardy "sea change" in U.S. policy will be obvious to many observers in the Middle East, who will no doubt distrust U.S. motivations in brokering a lasting peace.

And it's not an enviable task. The personal hatred that Sharon and Arafat display toward each other is one obstacle. And a far bigger one is the legacy of the most recent violence.

For most Israelis, the suicide bombings sent a message that many Palestinians will never be satisfied until Israel ceases to exist and that the militants are willing to use any means, however immoral, to attain this end.

For most Palestinians, the brutality of Sharon's invasion drove home the message that the Israeli government has no interest in peace, only in subjugation.

Could Sharon have done anything more humiliating to Yasser Arafat?

How must it have made Palestinians, and Arabs around the world, feel to see the leader of the Palestinian people holed up in two rooms as Israeli tanks and troops crashed through his compound?

How surreal was it to have Bush tell Arafat he could do more to end terror when Arafat's very life was at stake?

And how surreal was it for Bush to tell Arafat to have his security forces clamp down on terrorists when Israel was knocking off those very same security forces?

The United States gives $3 billion a year in aid to Israel, and Israel was using U.S. F-16s and Apache helicopters to rain down holy hell upon Palestinians. Sharon must not be allowed to engage in his butchery with U.S. weaponry.

Now Arafat may be more Mugabe than Mandela, but Arafat is the leader of the Palestinians. Only he has the legitimacy to sign a meaningful peace accord.

And Arafat is just one Palestinian out of hundreds of thousands who were under siege. Sharon heaped violence and abuse upon Palestinian civilians in town after town. His troops wrecked cars, knocked down houses, ransacked homes, rounded up adult males by the thousands, fired upon ambulances and hospitals, refused to let people bury their dead, and deprived whole Palestinian towns of electricity, food, and water.

These acts will not vanquish terrorism; they are its recruiting call.

The Israel Defense Forces killed many innocent Palestinians during the invasion. And they sadistically treated many others.

Maha Sbitani is a Palestinian American living in Ramallah, near Yasser Arafat's compound. "Today, at 5:00 A.M., I was awakened by what sounded like huge trucks," she wrote on March 30 in an article posted by Media Monitors Network. "When I looked out the window, I saw several tanks. A half hour later, the Israeli soldiers rang the bell. We did not answer. Then I heard them coming up the steps.... My husband opened the door to find endless huge guns pointed at us. They pushed the door open and distributed themselves throughout the house and office. Over fifty heavily armed soldiers were now in the office and home.... They started to rip the curtains and break things.... They were everywhere, and doing what they felt like doing, including urinating on the floor."

The invasion will not have its desired effect. "The generals look helplessly at a struggle they do not understand and make arrogant statements divorced from reality," Uri Avnery of the Israeli peace movement Gush Shalom wrote in the International Herald Tribune on March 28. "Pronouncements like `We have taught them a lesson,' or `We have destroyed the infrastructure of terrorism,' show an infantile lack of understanding of what they are doing. On the contrary, they have built a hothouse for rearing suicide bombers. A person whose beloved brother has been killed, whose house has been destroyed in an orgy of vandalism, who has been mortally humiliated before the eyes of his children, goes to the market and buys a rifle. This sort of hatred is now everywhere."

Sharon's philosophy of violence--"Many losses must be inflicted so that the enemy will feel the heavy price of his actions"--is loathsome to the core, as is his habit of upping the violence whenever the possibility of negotiation arises.

Israel's thirty-five-year occupation--illegal under international law and condemned by the United Nations--has been a disaster. It has nourished two generations of Palestinians on the dust of oppression, and it daily inflicts indignities that no people would long tolerate. That occupation must end, and Israeli settlements must be dismantled.

For their part, Palestinians are not even close to being blameless in the current debacle. Intentionally killing innocent people is as low as you can go. There is no lower note on the moral scale, except perhaps to celebrate such killing, which many Palestinians appear to be doing. And Arafat, notorious for talking out of both sides of his mouth, has showed a stunning reluctance to denounce, or rein in where possible, the perpetrators of Palestinian terror.

But generalizing to an entire population is inaccurate and dangerous. There is no such entity as "the Palestinians" or "the Israelis." Many Palestinians have been aghast at the suicide bombings (see Hanan Ashrawi, "Where We Went Wrong," February issue), and many are calling for a new, nonviolent approach. And many Israelis, including 1,000 refuseniks and tens of thousands of protesters, condemn Sharon's actions and demand an end to the occupation.

These advocates of nonviolence on both sides need to be embraced.

The Saudi peace plan for a universal settlement of the conflict also represents an opening. It is eminently reasonable and ought to be accepted by all parties. It calls for Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories in exchange for an end to Palestinian violence and for formal recognition of Israel by Arab nations. Now is the time to seize this initiative and try to bring this bloody 50 Years War to an end.

With extremism and violence in ascendancy, fueled by a volatile mix of religion and nationalism and a history of victimization on both sides, calm voices of peace and sanity are urgently needed all around. The suicide bomber's belt must be unbuckled, the oppressor's heel lifted.