MIDDLE EAST: Decolonisation is at the heart of the Palestinian crisis, writes David Hirst in Damascus
Since Yasser Arafat's death, international attention has shifted away from Iraq toward the other, older Middle East crisis. British Prime Minister Tony Blair, this week in Israel and the West Bank, has urged President Bush to revitalise the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, "the single most pressing political challenge in our world today".
Then, in a report flatly contradicting administration orthodoxy, the Pentagon's Defence Science Board said the two crises were linked: America's problems in Iraq arose not from Muslims' hatred of US freedoms, but from its policies, and "what they see as one-sided support in favour of Israel and against Palestinian rights".
For Arabs and Muslims, the Palestine problem, a legacy of Western colonialism, has always been the greatest single source of anti-Western sentiment.
If Islamist terrorism is the greatest single contemporary threat to global order, and Iraq its most profitable arena, the Palestinian problem is a key contributor to the political climate in which it takes root.
For Muslims, the remarkable thing is the way the West has repeatedly ignored or overridden this reality, with Iraq the latest example. True, most Iraqis wanted to be rid of Saddam Hussein. But the more badly managed, repressive, arrogant and bloody this American-led "liberation" has turned out to be, the more it is seen as another quasi-colonial, Western aggression - another Palestine, in fact.
There were warnings aplenty, before the invasion, that this would happen. Mr Blair himself clearly saw it would have been a very good idea to do something serious for the Palestinians first. But the US administration's pro-Israeli, neo-conservative hawks insisted the road to Jerusalem lay through Baghdad.
What, for Blair, would have been merely prudent risk-avoidance before the war now looks more like a desperate bid to salvage what can be salvaged from the deepening Iraqi mess.
US presidents have never underestimated the importance of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The trouble is that, thanks to the partisanship noted by the Pentagon, they never acknowledge the real nature of the problem, which is essentially one of decolonisation.
Mr Arafat's death will only reconfirm that congenital inability - though this time, because of Iraq and al-Qaeda, in more critical circumstances than ever. If the Palestinians were to secure the redress that other colonised peoples have, there would be either no Israel - as there is no Algérie française - or a bi-national state which has lost its exclusively Jewish character.
But the Palestinians are not demanding that. They have formally committed themselves to the loss of 78 per cent of their original homeland. They did so under Mr Arafat's auspices. Yet the US called him an obstacle to peace who had to be replaced by moderate leaders who would give up even more. A new leadership won't do that, especially if it is the democratic one the US wants, because, reflecting the popular will, it simply couldn't.
That Mr Sharon is no less an obstacle to peace than Mr Arafat ever was, and Israeli moderation as necessary as Palestinian, is a thought that might then occur to Mr Bush. But it isn't one which, as similar thoughts in his first term rudely taught him, he will find politic to act upon. He is far too beholden to his neo-conservative administrators, a Jewish lobby now dominated by its right-wing, "Likudnik" factions, and Christian fundamentalists who support as warlike and expansionist an Israel as possible.
Arabs wonder anxiously if the re-elected Mr Bush will embark on more Iraq-like enterprises. Continued, incorrigible partisanship in Palestine, combined with remorseless deterioration in Iraq, will certainly make it more likely.