To hear Secretary of State Rice tell it yesterday, the Middle East negotiations are just getting started. “The Israelis and Palestinians are taking the initial step on the path to peace,” Ms. Rice said. “These are initial discussions to build confidence between the parties.” We don’t scorn the secretary. No doubt it’s her job to try to put an optimistic face on matters, and a certain amount of forgetfulness may be necessary to any peace that is crafted between Israel and her Arab neighbors. But at a certain point she exposes herself, and the president she represents, to ridicule.

It was in November of 1991, after all — more than 15 years ago — that the actual “initial discussions” between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs took place, at the Madrid Conference during the administration of President George H.W. Bush. That conference proceeded on ground rules that were insisted upon by one of the finest and longest-serving prime ministers of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, who would not negotiate with Palestinian Arabs connected with the Palestine Liberation Organization, a terrorist group, or with Palestinian Arabs from Israel’s capital of Jerusalem.

Those were sound principles then and, by our lights, still are. In any event, it was the abandonment of those principles that was the central act of Oslo, an abandonment of principle that was soon being touted as the breakthrough to peace, although it turned out to be the road to war. It has been more than 13 years since the Rabin-Arafat handshake hosted by President Clinton in September of 1993 on the White House lawn. And then there were the meetings at what is called Camp David II, where a lameduck Clinton administration signed on to the notion of dividing Jerusalem only to usher in not peace but the second intifada.

The hollowness of the description of the current process as “initial” is made clear by another comment of the secretary yesterday, in which she spoke of actions that the Palestinian Authority could take to “contribute significantly to the fulfillment of their people’s longing for a better life and a state of their own — steps that must begin with abandoning terrorism.” Fifteen years after Madrid, 13 years after the White House handshake, an American secretary of state is still urging the Palestinian Arabs to “begin” by abandoning terrorism.

Hope springs eternal, and peace sometimes takes a long time to cultivate. Some day perhaps the Palestinian Arab leaders will abandon terrorism. But more than 13 years into an attempt to negotiate with a terrorist gang called the Palestine Liberation Organization, it is no longer a moment to talk about steps being “initial.” If there were any logic to the effort, America would have long since dropped its attempts to negotiate with the PLO, or to pressure Israel to do so, and embarked on a genuinely new beginning of sponsoring negotiations between Israel and non-Arafat Palestinian Arabs. Those would be discussions that Ms. Rice could describe as “the initial step on the path to peace” without embarrassing herself or appearing to have come down with a case of amnesia.