For those with time in grade on the Middle East “peace” beat, the atmospherics in advance of the Annapolis Summit are all too familiar. The past week’s news is a case in point. Israel offers a “settlement freeze,” playing into the idea that it is the presence of Israeli Jews in Judea and Samaria that is preventing peace from breaking out in the Mideast. The Wall Street Journal runs a column on President Bush’s Iran strategy reporting that pushing the Arab-Israeli negotiations is needed “to knit together a Sunni Arab coalition against Iran.” It also runs out a front-page news story suggesting that the real stumbling block in the quest for peace is not Arab terrorism or refusal to accept Israel’s right to exist, but Israeli counterterrorism checkpoints. Left-wing Jewish groups lobby Congress to pour millions more American taxpayer dollars into a Palestinian Authority led by allies of Yasser Arafat.

President Bush, at his best, has tried to break out of this tradition. He began by breaking the pattern of the Clinton administration, which was marked by the spectacle of Secretary of State Albright and other officials hectoring the duly elected prime minister in Jerusalem, particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, to be more forthcoming in negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs. Mr. Bush signaled early on that he was going to avoid that pattern, and, as luck would have it, he was favored by the accession in Israel of Ariel Sharon, with whom Mr. Bush had, as governor of Texas, developed a warm relationship. The commonality of their interests was thrown into particularly sharp relief by the attacks of September 11, when millions of Americans gained a sense of the kind of terror Israelis had been living under for years. Mr. Bush also seems to have learned from the experience of his father, who erred by trying to pressure Israel through the use of guarantees for housing loans.

President George W. Bush had several meetings with Prime Minister Sharon, in which, we’d like to think, he gained an understanding that summitry in and of itself has only a limited ability to accomplish anything. If the Israeli people, through their elected representatives, want to pursue peace deals with their neighbors, America can help facilitate such agreements. But it does neither Israel nor America any service to push Israel into concessions — such as a division of the Israeli capital or the withdrawal of the Jewish state into insecure borders — that its own elected leaders resist. What’s more, a peace conference comprising unfree, undemocratic countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Syria, risks undermining the hopes of those fighting for freedom in those countries.

The same individuals who now contend that progress on the track between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs is necessary to contain Iran were the ones who wanted to lean on Israel in the run-up to the Iraq War. In fact the American expedition in Iraq has strengthened the possibilities for peace in Israel, with Israel no longer facing the threat of Iraqi scuds and tanks, and the Palestinian Arab suicide bombers losing a financial patron. Once the threats of the terrorist-sponsoring regimes in Iran and Syria are removed, the Palestinian Arabs may begin to accept the need for a negotiated settlement, as they began to do with the collapse of their Soviet patron in the early 1990s. Until then, wresting concessions from Israel will only embolden the terrorists.

As Mr. Bush and his state secretary near their final year in office, there is a natural tendency to grasp for a legacy. But we have been down that road before, to disastrous effect. President Clinton’s desperation at Camp David demonstrated that a final Arab-Israeli settlement with this Palestinian Arab leadership is chimerical. Better to invest the energy and time of the principals in dealing with the Iranian, Saudi, and Syrian threats, while leaving the details between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs to lower-level functionaries, and pursuing — at a strategic level — the standing of those Palestinian Arabs who are prepared to place a bet on free markets and liberal democracy.

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Our own hope for Mr. Bush’s final year in office lies with his second inaugural, in which he picked up on themes laid down by President Kennedy, in his own inaugural (as we discussed in an editorial at the time that ran under a the headline “John Fitzgerald Bush.” The most stirring phrases from Mr. Bush’s speech were those that seemed aimed almost directly at the unfree people’s overseas, those in the dungeons who were looking for signs from America that it understood their plight and was on their side. We recall the writings of Natan Sharansky about how he took inspiration from the hard line being pursued by President Reagan. The danger at Annapolis will be in sending the opposite signal, that America is prepared, while people are still in dungeons, to meet with the tyrants who are keeping them there. It may be true that Israel herself is desiring a dialog with its enemies. But quite apart from the workaday details of the negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, Mr. Bush and his envoys will need to be careful of the signals they send at Annapolis, lest dispirit the very partisans of freedom we want to be helping.