WASHINGTON – The Bush administration will respond to the death of Yasser Arafat by pressing for Palestinian reform rather than a resumption of the final-status negotiation with Israel.

Some in the pro-Israel community here had feared that a second Bush term, along with the death of Arafat, would bring additional pressure from Washington on Jerusalem. Mr. Bush might reach for an Arab-Israeli deal as a legacy, and Mr. Bush, in his second term, would be less constrained by fear of alienating key domestic constituencies, this reasoning went.

But sources inside and outside the administration say that Mr. Bush not only had a warm meeting with Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, who views Palestinian freedom and civil society as preconditions for Israeli concessions – he has adopted Mr. Sharansky’s policy as his own.

In the last 10 days, senior White House officials have fanned out across Washington to quietly inform Congress, diplomats, think tank analysts, and key interest groups that the president intends to press the next Palestinian leader to make key structural changes to insure the rule of law, effective counterterrorism, and transparency before reviving the negotiations that stalled in the final weeks of the Clinton presidency.

On Monday, for example, the president’s nominee for secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, met with leaders of the Jewish community and promised that America would not send a new envoy or endorse a peace conference after the January 9 Palestinian elections, according to attendees of the meeting.

The executive vice chairman of the conference of presidents of major Jewish Organizations, Malcolm Hoenlein, said yesterday, “We were very pleased with the discussion that they recognized the opportunities from the changes in the region like Arafat’s departure. At the same time the administration recognizes a full sense of the realities and they will abide by the principles enunciated by the president all along.”

Last week, the national security council’s senior adviser on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams, met with European ambassadors at the White House where he stressed the president’s statement that America’s position was that an eventual final settlement would have to acknowledge Israel’s claim to the territory on the West Bank that hosts the majority of settlements.

An administration official familiar with the president’s policy told The New York Sun yesterday, “There will not be a round of shuttle diplomacy and there will not be efforts to push final status issues. But there will be increased diplomatic efforts to help the Palestinians succeed in their reforms and help Prime Minister Sharon succeed in the Gaza disengagement.”

To that end, the State Department’s Bureau of Near East Affairs is already hard at work drawing up a series of specific reforms it would like to see in the Palestinian territories after the elections scheduled for January 9. Next week, American diplomats will travel to Oslo for two successive meetings on Palestinian reform among the donors supporting the original 1993 Oslo Accords and a working group created by the quartet to address the reform requirements set forth in the road map. In September, 45 Palestinian security officers received training from the Egyptian intelligence and the CIA. American officials say the agency plans to oversee more of this kind of training in the coming months.

While the president has voiced support for democracy before negotiations in his speeches since his June 24, 2002, Rose Garden address urging the Palestinian people to choose new and different leaders untainted by terror, his diplomacy has been marked by numerous efforts to impose an eventual settlement of the final status issues unresolved when Arafat and Ehud Barak failed to cut a deal in 2000. Most notable was the creation of the “road map,” a set of commitments that envisioned a peace conference by the end of 2003 and the formation of the “quartet,” a working group comprised of American, European Union, Russian, and United Nations diplomats to shepherd the eventual negotiations.

With the death in November of Arafat, three pillars of that quartet – the Europeans, Russians, and United Nations, lobbied Mr. Bush to name a special en for the issue and set a time frame for when the final status talks would start again. Indeed, a group of European foreign ministers had planned a visit to Ramallah in November before Arafat became ill in an effort to revive the ailing leader’s image and restart peace discussions.

The road map’s strongest advocate inside the Bush administration was the departing secretary of state, Colin Powell. His assistant secretary for Near East affairs, William Burns, has also been offered the ambassadorship in Moscow. Meanwhile, Mr. Burns’s rival inside the first Bush administration on Middle East policy, Mr. Abrams, is being considered for the powerful position of deputy national security adviser. In an administration in which policy has often been determined by personnel, new advisers will also likely bring new approaches.

Instead of looking like a warmed-over version of President Clinton’s Near East diplomacy, the president’s approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict looks to be following the tone and substance of the ideas of Mr. Sharansky, whom he met on November 11 before a critical meeting with Prime Minister Blair of Britain as Arafat was dying in a Paris hospital. Mr. Bush is said to have read Mr. Sharansky’s latest book in which the former Soviet dissident said the road map process undermined the substance of Mr. Bush’s June 24, 2002, speech envisioning new and different Palestinian leaders.

Mr. Sharansky has served as a key channel between Prime Minister Sharon and the Bush administration since December 2000, when he met with Vice President Cheney soon after the Supreme Court decision that handed Mr. Bush the presidency. Mr. Sharansky went on Israeli television after his meeting with Mr. Cheney, whom he has known since his release from a Soviet gulag, and said the new administration would not pressure Israel to negotiate with Arafat. Since that meeting, Mr. Sharansky has slowly but surely made his case to Ms. Rice, the vice president, and other key administration officials that no peace with the Palestinian Arabs would be possible for Israel until a Palestinian leadership became committed to building the institutions of a free state.

“The peace process has always been characterized by form over substance, process over peace. President Bush made clear that he is uninterested in summits for the sake of cocktails and conferences to trade accusations,” the vice president for foreign policy and defense studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, said yesterday. “I imagine if the process for achieving genuine results on the ground is real, the White House will do all that it takes and more.”