On Monday, Yossi Beilin, Yasser Abed Rabbo, and maybe even President Carter will gather at Geneva to present and promote — but not sign — an accord that seeks to settle the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs by creating for the Arabs a new state of Palestine and giving it a capital in Jerusalem, including sovereignty over the Temple Mount.

As our Eli Lake reports at page one today, there is talk that President Carter will attend the ceremony on Monday, and a group of past secretaries of state and national security advisers — Samuel Berger, Madeleine Albright, Brent Scowcroft and James Baker — are said to be considering a letter jointly endorsing the Geneva plan.

That is entirely appropriate, for the Geneva plan is of a piece with the Middle East peace efforts that were undertaken under Presidents Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton. That is to say, the Geneva plan pretty much ignores the central, revolutionary insight of George W. Bush’s Middle East policy — the notion that Israel can only make a genuine peace with a Palestinian Authority that is free and democratic and that is governed by the rule of law. The draft of the Geneva plan that is posted on the Web site of the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz contains not one mention of freedom or democracy; in fact, it states, “The Parties are committed not to interfere in each other’s internal affairs,” a formulation that has been deployed as a self-defense measure by dictatorships dating back to the old Soviet Union.

The preamble to the accord states that “this Agreement is concluded within the framework of …the Declaration of Principles of September 13, 1993, the subsequent agreements including the Interim Agreement of September 1995, the Wye River Memorandum of October 1998 and the Sharm El-Sheikh Memorandum of September 4, 1999, and the permanent status negotiations including the Camp David Summit of July 2000, the Clinton Ideas of December 2000,and the Taba Negotiations of January 2001.” In other words, the series of agreements under which Yasser Arafat and his thugs consolidated their ironclad and kleptocratic control over the West Bank and Gaza.

Mr. Bush has rightfully called for a change in this pattern. He demonstrated his commitment to freedom and democracy in the Arab world yesterday with a personally risky and incredibly inspiring Thanksgiving visit to newly free Iraq. That was a step forward. The Geneva accord is a step backward. The Bush administration is wise to avoid sending a high-level representative to Monday’s event. If the Palestinian Arabs are looking for an American to bless their grab for Temple Mount sovereignty, they can always pull the same stunt they are pulling by negotiating with Mr. Beilin — whose Labor Party did, after all, lose the election — and call in Al Gore.