The culture of lies that was Yasser Arafat’s bequest to the Palestinian people has surfaced quickly after his death in the reaction of his likely successor, Mahmoud Abbas (aka “Abu Mazen”), to the shooting incident that took place in Gaza two days ago while Mr. Abbas was attending a commemorative gathering for the departed PLO leader.

“What happened,” Mr. Abbas said of the incident, “had no personal or political motives. We [he and his entourage] were receiving the mourners when the powerful emotions released by Arafat’s death led to jostling and unintentional shooting in the air.”

This, scant minutes after dozens of armed members of the Al Aksa Brigades, the military wing of Mr. Abbas’s own Fatah organization, had invaded the ceremony, shouted, “We warn the imposters pretending to be the heirs of Yasser Arafat, no matter how senior their rank, not to dare call off the intifada or betray his legacy,” and opened fire, killing two of Mr. Abbas’s bodyguards before making their getaway.

No personal or political motives, indeed.

Palestinian Authority spokesmen may be correct in saying that this was not an assassination attempt on Mr. Abbas. Had it been one, he probably would not have survived it. But it was an attempt to frighten and intimidate him – one that, judging by his reaction, was highly successful.

Judging by this reaction, too, the world can save itself the inevitable disappointment of hoping that Arafat’s death, and the election of a new Palestinian leadership in his place, will revive the Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” and lead to productive negotiations with the Sharon government.

It’s simple logic. Before it can resume the negotiations with Israel that were broken off after the failure of the Camp David and Taba talks of the year 2000, a Palestinian leadership has to do two things. The first is to put an end to the terroristic violence that broke out, with Palestinian Authority approval and connivance, in the autumn of 2000. The second is to abandon maximalist Palestinian demands, above all those concerning “the right of return” of Palestinian refugees, that are nonstarters from the Israeli point of view.

A leadership headed by a man who calls the intimidating murder of two of his bodyguards “unintentional shooting in the air” is not going to be able to achieve either of these things. It will not have the will to impose law and order on gunmen and suicide bomb dispatchers within its own ranks, let alone on those belonging to opposition organizations like the Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and it will not have the ability to renounce the extreme negotiating positions that the holders of the guns espouse.

Nor is it just the holders of the guns who espouse them. Much of the Palestinian street does, too. If the Palestinian Authority holds the democratic elections it has promised, not just to choose Arafat’s heir, but also to elect a new Palestinian Legislative Council, the current members of which have been serving since 1996, this will not be a body disposed to compromises with Israel.

In general, there is a prevalent misconception regarding the role of Palestinian democracy in facilitating a peaceful settlement of the conflict with Israel. In the long run, there is merit to the argument that democratic states are intrinsically more peaceful and less likely than dictatorships to seek wars with their neighbors as a way of externalizing internal discontent.

In the short run, however, a more democratic Palestine is a society that will be more, not less radical in its demands on Israel. This was, indeed, the reason that Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, in engineering the 1993 Oslo Agreement, preferred to deal with a corrupt and autocratic PLO leadership in the hope that it could deliver a peace that the Palestinian public would never have agreed to. Although they turned out to be wrong, there was a rational basis to their thinking.

The irony is that, if the Palestinians do hold successful democratic elections, this will only be because of the Israeli troop presence on their land that allegedly – so the conventional wisdom holds – is a hindrance to a free vote. The reason is obvious. If the Palestinians were to behave like other Arab societies, they would settle the question of Arafat’s succession not by the ballot box but by the gun: The best-organized strongman would rally his troops, overcome his opponents, and seize power. They cannot behave this way only because the presence among them of the Israeli army, and their separation by Israel into two noncontiguous areas in Gaza and the West Bank, makes it impossible.

For Israel, the bottom line is that the negotiations with the Palestinians that did not succeed while Yasser Arafat was running the show are not going to succeed now that he is gone, either. This should not be an excuse for doing nothing. On the contrary, it is more important than ever that the government press ahead with its plan for disengagement from Gaza and with the completion of the West Bank security fence, to which it must eventually be prepared to withdraw unilaterally, too.

None of this excludes reaching agreements with the Palestinian Authority on specific issues or of coordinating disengagement with it on a logistical level. It does mean, however, that Israel should not waste time or energy on the mirage of a negotiated peace that has appeared again on the horizon with Arafat’s death.

Although this is what the world expects it to do, and what it may have to go through the motions of doing, it should be clear that nothing will come of it. You can’t negotiate with those who claim that the murderers of peace are merely aiming at the air.

Mr.Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.