On the eve of Prime Minister Sharon’s meeting with President Bush, the Palestinian Arab premier, Mahmoud Abbas, was going around declaring that the time had come to “put the past behind us.” One of the places he did this was in the same interview with the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth in which he also voiced his determination to cling to the past positions of the Palestinian Arabs with respect to the 1967 borders and their insistence on dividing Jerusalem. Those two claims were unacceptable even before the campaign of attacks on Jewish civilians known as the intifada. What he’s suggesting, in other words, is that in re turn for a campaign of targeting Jewish women, schoolchildren, and infants his government deserves to get half of Jerusalem and a retreat by Israel to borders to which not even the United Nations was prepared, when it adopted Resolution 242, to ask Israel to return.

This would all be mere tragicomedy save for the turn the Bush administration has taken on these matters in the months since the president’s Rose Garden speech of June 24, 2002, when he declared for Palestinian democracy. This started with the visit of Condoleezza Rice to Jerusalem, where she bought into the idea that the fence that Israel has been building to interdict suicide bombers is somehow antithetical to the concept of reaching a negotiated settlement on the borders. Some say the dispute over the fence is a minor issue, others a major one. Our sense is that the major issue is the glimpse it provides into a White House that hasn’t thought the problem through. The big danger in the war between Israel and the Arabs, after all, is not in the notion that there is no hope for the Palestinian Arabs, but rather in the holding out to them of false hopes. In this the administration is playing with fire.

Politically, as well. On the eve of Mr. Sharon’s visit, the New York Times published a dispatch on the pending trip to Israel of the majority leader in the house, Thos. DeLay, who is dissenting from Mr. Bush’s policy of treating with the Palestinian Arabs. And it’s not just Mr. DeLay. As Mr. Sharon was arriving in Washington, our Adam Daifallah buttonholed one of the Democratic candidates, Senator Lieberman, to ask about the much-disputed fence. The senator said he was reluctant to answer the question “on one foot” but went on to warn, “We should be hesitant to interrupt the Israelis’ building of a security wall until there is the clear action by the Palestinian leadership that we also want to stop terrorism from the Palestinian areas.” It’s a logical point, and the White House is in a pickle when it is being criticized by the Democrats from the right.

As drawn, Israel’s security fence is not following the old 1967 border, a line which results not from international recognition but from the armistice which ended the fighting in 1949. It may be natural for Palestinians to protest that up to 10% of the West Bank is being joined to Israel proper, on the western side of the new fence. Israel maintains that this is a defensive border, rather than a political one. If, in the worst-case analysis, it becomes a political border through a continuation of Arab intransigence and terrorism, that would mark a significant shift away from the maximalism of which many accuse the Israeli right. The Palestinians have not done nearly enough to warrant seeing daylight between the governments in Washington and Jerusalem. Most significantly, they have failed to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, a demand raised by Mr. Bush and reiterated in the opening lines of the “road map.” Mr. Bush is now presenting a list of Palestinian demands to Mr. Sharon when he would be better off standing by the principles he himself has articulated.