The senior representative of the Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem, Sari Nusseibeh, is scheduled to speak at 7 p.m. tonight at a synagogue on the Upper West Side, Congregation B’nai Jeshurun. He is expected to be greeted by a group of protesters who object to the synagogue’s offering a podium to Mr. Nusseibeh. He is described by American doves as a “moderate.” But on June 29, 2002, he appeared on Al-Jazeera television with the mother of a suicide bomber. This mother, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has pointed out, appeared in a farewell video sending her son on his murderous mission. In that television appearance Mr. Nusseibeh said, “All respect is due to this mother, it is due to every Palestinian mother and every female Palestinian who is a Jihad fighter on this land. I do not wish to mix political statements and commentary with the respect every Palestinian feels for every Jihad fighter and for anyone who truly thinks that there is no life under the occupation, except in freedom and dignity.”

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Blair, who has been a stalwart ally of America so far when it concerned Afghanistan and Iraq, gave a speech in which he said, “By this year’s end we must have revived final-status negotiations, and they must have explicitly as their aims an Israeli state free from terror, recognized by the Arab world, and a viable Palestinian state based on the boundaries of 1967.” All the more ironical in light of the fact that it was the Lord Caradon, envoy of Prime Minister Wilson of Mr. Blair’s own Labor Party, who drafted Security Council Resolution 242. He explained later, according to Myths and Facts, “It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967, because those positions were undesirable and artificial.”

And also this week, President Bush, breaking his campaign promise to restore honor and dignity to the White House, signed into law a bill that his administration proceeded to declare was unconstitutional and vowed to ignore. This was a measure championed by the Rep. Anthony Weiner of Brooklyn, an emerging champion. It requires the Bush administration to take certain measures — in stamping passports of foreign-born citizens, for instance — to implement the current American law recognizing Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel.

What Mr. Nusseibeh’s propaganda tour and Mr. Blair’s speech and Mr. Bush’s backtracking are all about is not smoothing the diplomatic path for an attack on Iraq, or, for that matter, avoiding distraction in the war on “terror,” or even negotiating a peaceful settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict. They are part of an effort to wrest from America’s true, free and democratic ally in the Middle East control of its sovereign capital — and to divide that capital so that part of it ends up in the hands of the very terrorists who have been attacking Israel and refusing to acknowledge its right to exist.

The Jewish connection to Jerusalem goes back 3,000 years. Israel has administered the city since 1967 in a way that has allowed free access to holy sites to people of all faiths. This stands in marked contrast to the last time the Arabs held the city, from 1948 to 1967, during which time synagogues were leveled and Jewish tombstones were used for Jordanian army latrines. The American Congress has overwhelmingly and repeatedly recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and recognized the need to maintain it as an undivided city. This is enshrined in the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995. While a presidential waiver applies to the financial penalties for not moving the American embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, the requirement to move the embassy and the policy on Jerusalem as Israel’s capital are not subject to waiver.

The overwhelming Congressional sentiment on the subject should be read as a signal of where the American public stands. No amount of praisers of Jihad speaking at Upper West Side synagogues or Blairist Blackpool blather by the prime minister of the once-great British empire or presidential civil disobedience is going to change this. Dividing a free and democratic country’s capital and handing half of it to the terrorists is no way for a great nation like America to treat its friends or to do anything other than whet the appetite of the terrorists whose defeat we seek.