Another Palestinian Arab suicide bomber attacked a café in an Israeli shopping mall yesterday, killing a 60-year-old woman and her year-old granddaughter and wounding about 40. The Jerusalem Post’s report of the attack notes that the terrorist came from Yasser Arafat’s Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The Post quotes “a senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office” as saying that the perpetrators of the attack were on Mr. Arafat’s payroll. Mr. Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, meanwhile, went on to issue a ritualistic denunciation of the attack on the grounds that it was “harmful” to “the image of the Palestinian people before international public opinion.”

Meanwhile, in Washington, a surrealistic debate is reportedly unfolding among President Bush’s advisers. There are some who want to press Mr. Arafat to shape up, and there are others who want to cut him lose entirely. The surrealistic aspect is that after nearly a decade of Mr. Arafat’s shenanigans, there are some who want to persist in propping him up in the face of the mountains of evidence that he is incorrigible. Theirs is self-defeating advice, as no less a luminary than Dennis Ross’s new colleague, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, noted in a recent memo. With respect to Mr. Arafat, Mr. Satloff noted, “as long as outside powers publicly declare his role as interlocutor secure and inviolable, reforms are likely to be cosmetic at most.”

One somewhat refreshing new voice in the debate is Omar Karsou, a Palestinian Arab who appeared on Friday in Washington at a forum sponsored by the Hudson Institute. He was accompanied by the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, and by the eminent historian of Islam, Bernard Lewis. Among the points Mr. Karsou makes is that the Palestinian Arabs themselves are being manipulated by the Arafat-controlled press. Even subject to that manipulation, Mr. Karsou says, they are disgusted with the level of corruption among Mr. Arafat and his cronies. Asked on Friday what he wanted America to do, Mr. Karsou says America risks losing its superpower status if it doesn’t use “moral clarity in applying the same standards all over the world.” He cited America’s principled stances against the Soviet Communists and the Cuban Communists as examples. He suggested that American officials should not meet with shady Arafat aides and that America should insist on financial accountability whenever it sends aid money to the West Bank and Gaza.

It’s encouraging that these ideas are now being bruited about by advisers to the Pentagon and by some of the Palestinian Arabs themselves. It’s discouraging, however, that in choosing his envoys to dispatch to the region, President Bush is relying on the tired team at the State Department’s Near East Bureau and at the Central Intelligence Agency. They are the ones whose advice helped get America into the current mess in the West Bank and Gaza. The State Department is the agency whose spokesman has tried famously to explain how Israel’s attacks on Palestinian terrorists were different from America’s attacks on Al Qaeda terrorists. No moral clarity there. And the CIA, for all the ways it might be useful in the war against Iran or Iraq, is by its very secretive nature not the right agency to send an envoy to a Palestinian Authority whose residents are desperate for some transparency.