When President Bush welcomes the Palestinian Arab prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, to the White House on Friday, the context will be a series of ominous signals from the administration with respect to policy toward Israel. These steps and statements have so far attracted little notice in the rest of the press, but they don’t bode well for the security of Israelis or of Americans.

The Signal: In an interview with Radio Monte Carlo that was released over the weekend, Secretary of State Powell was asked, “you are putting a lot of pressure and condition on the Palestinian side. Why don’t you do the same with Israel?” Mr. Powell responded, “You’re wrong, sir. We are putting pressure on both sides. We are putting pressure on the Palestinian side to bring down the terror and violence and we are putting pressure on the Israeli side to eliminate the unauthorized outposts; to commit themselves to the road map; to turn over Gaza, which they have done; to turn back Bethlehem, which they have done.”

The Trouble: It’s just totally inappropriate for Mr. Powell to use the word “pressure,” in public, to describe America’s dealings with its one true, democratic, and free friend in the Middle East, Israel. Even if Mr. Powell does want to make the mistake of pressuring Israel privately, it’s silly to speak about it publicly. It sends counterproductive messages to both Israel and the Arab world. To Israel, it says, “If you yield on these issues, the whole world will know you are caving in to public American pressure. So the next time there is a negotiating obstacle, you can expect the world to draw the conclusion that what is needed to overcome it is more public American pressure. So if you want to send the friendly U.S.-Israel relationship into a spiral of public feuding, cave in now.” To the world, it says, “If you have a free democracy that cooperates with America on counterterrorism, trade, and other important issues, what you can expect in return is public pressure from America to make concessions to terrorists.”

The Signal: In the same radio interview, Mr. Powell was asked, “Mr. Powell, are you concerned that your image in the Arab world is tarnished and you need to make a lot of effort to win the hearts and minds of the public opinion in this region?” Mr. Powell answered: “Yes, of course. And I think that’s what we’re doing, when you see the effort that the president has put into the Middle East peace process and the presentation of the road map.”

The Trouble: We wish Mr. Powell would worry less about his image in the Arab world and more about his image among Americans. It’s a natural human instinct to want to be loved, but in this case Mr. Powell and Americans in general might consider what is really going on. For one thing, it is a false premise that America’s image in the Arab world is “tarnished.” Many Arabs are grateful to America for freeing Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. To the degree that America’s image is “tarnished,” it’s largely as a result of our support for corrupt dictators like President Mubarak in Egypt and the Saudi royal family, who channel their populations’ frustrations outward by encour aging anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda in their state-controlled press. If Mr. Powell is concerned about America’s image in the Arab world, it might be more productive to support pro-American alternatives to the current Egyptian and Saudi leaders, rather than applying “pressure” on the existing pro-American government in Israel.

The Signal: The State Department’s bureau of public affairs on Wednesday issued a one-page summary of the “road map” for peace in the Middle East. The original road map required the Palestinian Arabs at the outset to “undertake visible efforts on the ground to arrest, disrupt, and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere.” It also required the Palestinian Arabs to begin “sustained, targeted, and effective operations aimed at confronting all those engaged in terror and dismantlement of terrorist capabilities and infrastructure.” The orig inal road map also required that “All official Palestinian institutions end incitement against Israel.” The new State Department summary, on the other hand, strips out these requirements.

The Trouble: This contradicts what Mr. Bush has said on the subject as recently as June 25, 2003. Then Mr. Bush said,”It’s one thing to make a verbal agreement. But in order for there to be peace in the Middle East, we must see organizations such as Hamas dismantled.” If Messrs. Bush and Powell are sending different messages to the world about the need for dismantling Hamas, the likelihood that Hamas will be dismantled is likely to decrease.

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This doesn’t even begin to get into the decision to channel $20 million in American taxpayer funds directly to the Palestinian Authority. Mr. Abbas’s information minister, Nabil Amru, has a villa in Ramallah that the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies in Israel calls “a typ ical example of PA corruption, since it is an extravagant building estimated to have cost $2 million.” According to the same report, Mr. Abbas’s foreign minister, Nabil Sha’ath, “had installed an expensive air conditioning system (worth many thousands of dollars) in his Ramallah home from the funds of the Palestinian Ministry of Finance.” This is the authority into which American taxpayer funds are to be sunk.

Mr. Bush yesterday praised Mr. Abbas for “showing leadership and courage.” Earlier this month, according to a report in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the American ambassador to Israel, Daniel Kurtzer, called Mr. Abbas “a relatively weak man,” who tends to “run away from problems rather than try to solve them.” If Mr. Bush wants to pin his hopes for Middle East peace on one man, we wish him more success than the Clinton administration had with Yasser Arafat, who still isn’t completely out of the picture. If, on the other hand, he wants to base it on some consistent and sensible principles — like, say, the ones he enunciated in his June 24, 2002 speech — well, then, it’s hard to see the point of sitting down with Mr. Abbas until he’s taken a careful look at what his administration has been up to lately.