Plenty of eyebrows were raised by the body language Monday between President Bush and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah. When the crown prince arrived, half an hour late, Mr. Bush greeted him with what the Associated Press described as “a warm embrace and a kiss on both cheeks.” Then the pair were photographed holding hands while walking through a field of bluebonnets. What troubles us is not the body language but the substance of the joint declaration issued after the meeting.

We don’t want to be too much of a besserwisser, to use the Yiddishism once employed by Norman Podhoretz to connote a backseat driver. But the statement certainly included potentially problematic departures from this administration’s support for Israel. Quoth it: “We welcome the renewed determination of Saudi Arabia to pursue economic reform and its quest to join the World Trade Organization. We will work together as partners to complete our negotiations and with other WTO members in Geneva with the aim of welcoming Saudi Arabia into the WTO before the end of 2005.”

Yet as a professor of law at George Mason University, Eugene Kontorovich, has argued, the WTO is an organization dedicated to free trade, while Saudi Arabia maintains a strict economic boycott of Israel. Why should America support membership in a free trade organization for a country that by its actions has shown its hatred of Israel outweighs its interest in free trade?

Worse, Mr. Bush and the prince yesterday excavated from the scrap heap of history a so-called Saudi peace initiative that was really an effort to destroy Israel and take away its capital. “The United States thanks Crown Prince Abdullah for his bold initiative – adopted unanimously by the Arab Summit in 2002 – that seeks to encourage an Israel-Palestinian and Israel-Arab peace,” Monday’s statement said. Indeed, the initiative was adopted unanimously, by Arab diplomats that included representatives of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Bashar Assad’s Syria.

The final communique from the same Arab summit praised “the valiant martyrs” of the violent terrorist uprising against Israel, and went on to say that the Arab League “rejects threats of aggression against some Arab states, particularly Iraq, and reiterates categorical rejection of attacking Iraq.” It went on to say that the League “denounces international terrorism, including the terrorist attack on the United States on 11 September 2001, as well as the Israeli Government’s exploitation of this attack.” And the League couldn’t help itself from emphasizing “the distinction between international terrorism and the peoples’ legitimate right to resist foreign occupation.”

The substance of the Abdullah initiative as enunciated at Beirut referred not to U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which Americans, Israelis, and even the Palestinian Arabs have recognized as the basis for negotiations. It referred to U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194. That resolution, passed in 1948,calls for the entire Jerusalem area to be put under United Nations control and asks Israel to permit all Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. Reference to that dead letter today is, and can only be, code for an effort to destroy Israel as a Jewish state.

Finally, the Bush-Abdullah joint statement says, “It is our firm conviction that resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will remove a major source of tension and contribute to stability and progress in the region.” This is the old, flawed approach to the Middle East, the view propounded by Arabists at the State Department, that sees the Arab-Israeli conflict, as opposed to the tyrannical regimes in the Arab countries, as the primary source of the region’s problems.

Sometimes a kiss is just a kiss, a handhold just a handhold. And friendly gestures or joint statements can sometimes cloak stern private talks. Still, Mr. Bush has built up real credibility on the issues of Israel and the struggle for freedom in the Middle East. It’s sad to see him erode it even marginally on the basis of a friendly visit from a Saudi prince.