It was a splendid photo opportunity yesterday at Aqaba — Prime Minister Sharon and the newly appointed Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, shaking hands at President Bush’s urging, the Red Sea sparkling in the background. Splendid too, of course, was the handshake on the White House lawn in 1993 between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat. And what ensued after that was an onslaught of deadly terrorist attacks on Israelis and the creation of a corrupt Arafat-led dictatorship in the West Bank and Gaza. Skeptics are entitled to ask what’s different this time around.

The early signs aren’t particularly encouraging. Mr. Abbas’s words yesterday were strong. “We repeat our renunciation, a renunciation of terror against the Israelis wherever they might be. Such methods are inconsistent with our religious and moral traditions and are dangerous obstacles to the achievement of an independent, sovereign state we seek. These methods also conflict with the kinds of state we wish to build, based on human rights and the rule of law,” he said. “We will exert all of our efforts, using all our resources to end the militarization of the intifada, and we will succeed. The armed intifada must end.”

Yet just hours after those words had been spoken, armed attacks on Israelis were launched. The Jerusalem Post’s Margo Dudkevitch reported last night: “Shots were fired at soldiers near Nizlat Zeid west of Jenin in the West Bank Wednesday night. No one was wounded in the attack. In the Gaza Strip a mortar shell was fired at an Israeli community in the southern Gaza Strip, no one was wounded and no damage reported. Several grenades were thrown at soldiers near Rafah, the soldiers returned fire.”

No one is expecting an immediate end to all violence by the Palestinian Arabs. But people are expecting immediate territorial concessions by Israel. Therein lies one of the fundamental imbalances in the “land for peace” formula that is the conventional approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The land gets turned over, while the peace is merely promised.

There are other troubling signs, as well. “Israel has got responsibilities. Israel must deal with the settlements,” Mr. Bush was caught on television telling the Saudi and Egyptian leaders at Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. This is a fundamental misconception — that the presence of Jews in the historically Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria somehow is a threat to peace. Or that it is the “settlements,” rather than the very existence of a Jewish state, to which the Arab tyrants are opposed.

Mr. Bush also made the error yesterday of insulting Israel with the following comment. “Both prime ministers here agree that progress toward peace also requires an end to violence and the elimination of all forms of hatred and prejudice and official incitement — in school books, in broadcasts, and in the words used by political leaders. Both leaders understand that a future of peace cannot be founded on hatred and falsehood and bitterness.” This echoes the text of the “road map,” but it violates Israel’s first reservation to the road map: “The road map will not state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians.” It’s not that Israel wants to commit violence and incitement against Palestinians — it’s that it’s offensive to lump Israeli self-defense or legitimate education efforts with Arab terrorism and hatred. There’s no moral equivalence. It’s as if Mr. Bush and Osama bin Laden were brought together by Kofi Annan, who said, “Both leaders understand that progress toward peace requires an end to violence and the elimination of all forms of hatred and prejudice and official incitement.” The parallelism is just inappropriate, a false accusation.

Here, too, actions speak louder than words. The Palestinian Arab incitement is against America as well as against Israel. In Tuesday’s issue of the Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Mr. Abbas’s deputy foreign minister, Adli Sadeq, described Mr. Bush as the “head of the snake of the despicable invasion snake in Iraq,” according to the Middle East Media Research Institute. In April, after Mr. Abbas’s appointment as prime minister, the Palestinian Authority’s television station broadcast a sermon that said, according to Memri, “Allah, grant victory to the Iraqi army…Allah, defeat America and its allies…Allah, purify the Islamic soil from the American and British treason and defilement.”

Where Mr. Bush does deserve credit was for his statement yesterday that “America is strongly committed, and I am strongly committed, to Israel’s security as a vibrant Jewish state.” That formulation of Israel as a “Jewish state” was something that Mr. Abbas could not bring himself to utter yesterday, even though Mr. Sharon publicly expressed support for a “Palestinian state.” This is the subject of Israel’s sixth reservation to the road map: “In connection to both the introductory statements and the final settlement, declared references must be made to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state and to the waiver of any right of return for Jewish refugees to the state of Israel.”

Israel’s democratically elected government accepted the road map based only on the American government’s promise of May 23 that it would “fully and seriously” address Israel’s 14 reservations to the road map. Reservation two is that “the first condition for progress will be the complete cessation of terror, violence, and incitement.” As this process goes forward, Israelis, at least, will be judging it by counting hand grenades, not handshakes.