What we found ourselves thinking of as the reports came in from the Group of Eight Summit at Evian was the historical ghosts from the conference that took place there 65 years ago. This was the meeting at which, as the Connecticut Jewish Ledger put it in an editorial last week, the world turned away the Jews of Germany, and European Jewry was effectively consigned to the horrors of the Shoah. The predicament of the Jewish state today isn’t as dire as was that of the Jews of Europe three generations ago. But there has been a similar absence of clear-eyed thinking among the Europeans gathered at Evian.

The major European powers — if that is the word for the Europeans these days — seem intent more than anything else on marshaling pressure on Israel to compromise with the Palestinian Arabs. France has never retracted its endorsement of what it called the right of the Palestinians to carry out suicide bombings against the Jews in Israel. Our staunchest ally among the G-8, Britain, practically made it a condition of its support in the battle of Iraq that pressure be put on Israel. Hence we are off on the road map while Yasser Arafat is still in power and before the Palestinian Arabs have made a commitment to democracy and halted their terrorist attacks against Israel.

President Bush, to his credit, made it clear that he understands the need to frame the meeting at Evian. He gave his most important address in Europe in Poland, which stood so steadfastly with us in Iraq, and made a point, too, of stopping at Auschwitz. He spoke of it at Krakow, saying the murders that took place in the death camps remind us that “evil is real and must be called by name.” At key points in his presidency he has left little doubt that he understands that there are those operating now in the Middle East — the Iranians, with their nuclear program, for one — who would do to the Jews in Israel what the enemies of the Jews started to do in the Holocaust until they were, belatedly, confronted by free peoples and stopped.

The great mistake of the democracies 65 years ago at Evian was in signaling to the Nazis that the free world would not act to rescue European Jewry. Mr. Bush spoke eloquently at Krakow of how the events of September 11 were as decisive for America as Pearl Harbor and, as he put it, “the treachery of another September in 1939.” The lesson “of all those events,” he said, “is the same: Aggression and evil intent must not be ignored or appeased; they must be opposed early and decisively.” This is the same lesson, as Mr. Bush flies now to Egypt to meet with the Arab dictators and to Jordan to meet with Prime Minister Sharon and a presumptive Palestinian premier who has chalked up the Holocaust as a Zionist hoax. When Mr. Bush enters the Middle East theater, there will be only a fine line dividing the right move from appeasement. We’d like to think that’s one of the reasons he made the stops he did en route.