President Bush is no doubt going to get a guardedly warm response from Israel on his remarks on the Middle East. The wires were headlining the president’s call on the Palestinian Arabs to remove Yasser Arafat even while Mr. Bush was still speaking. This means that the government of America has finally come around to a truth about Mr. Arafat, a truth of which one politician above all others — we speak of Ariel Sharon — has been warning for years. Mr. Bush made some errors in his speech, suggesting that in the absence of a peace agreement it is somehow inappropriate for Jews to settle in Judea and Samaria. But Mr. Bush did seek to make it clear that the provisional Palestinian Arab state America is prepared to recognize (and finance) is one that is going to be democratic, committed to fighting terror under a unified command, honest, and prepared to live in peace with the Jewish State. The test in the coming years will be whether the appeasement camp that argued for Oslo — the process that brought us to the current war — is prepared now to back off from its campaign to pressure Israel to compromise and to undertake a campaign to hold the Palestinian Arabs to the standards Mr. Bush has just articulated.

This doesn’t have to be a spoiling effort. One of the points Israel’s deputy premier, Natan Sharansky, stressed when he received a reporter of The New York Sun last week was that in nation building, democracy doesn’t have to be the first step. Establishing the workings of democracy can’t be done overnight. The press has to be freed. Markets have to be set up. A system of law-making and law-enforcement needs to be established. Education has to be undertaken. It is, however, essential that democracy is the goal. It is democracy that provides the ultimate legitimacy. In a statement released last night, Mr. Sharon’s office said that “when the Palestinian Authority undergoes genuine reforms and a new leadership takes it place at its head … it will be possible to discuss ways of moving forward by diplomatic means.” Until then, Mr. Sharon has an unambiguous mandate to fight terror. His national unity coalition is the classic war-fighting government in Israel. Mr. Bush has been the first president in years prepared, for the most part, to back up such a coalition. Defeating the Islamic and secular terrorists who have come together in support of Mr. Arafat’s war is the first step to that most famous of Jewish injunctions on which the president ended his remarks, choose life.