This article was originally published by the San Francisco Chronicle and is republished with the permission of the author.

A general view of the scale of destruction in southern Beirut due to ongoing Israeli bombardments on the city. Humanitarian concerns mount as thousands of Lebanese try to flee the south. (Haitham Moussawi, IRIN)

Two weeks ago, I boarded a half-empty flight to Tel Aviv, then drove to the West Bank town of Ramallah to work on a U.S.-funded legislative reform project.

I had promised family and friends that I would steer clear of Israel's "northern front," the site of its increasingly deadly war in Lebanon, and its "southern front," the Gaza Strip, which Israeli forces re-invaded six weeks ago, reportedly to retrieve a captured soldier. They continue to bombard Gaza almost daily.

Ramallah, I assured loved ones, was safe -- disconnected from any trouble. I was both right and wrong. Despite the small distances in the Holy Land -- Ramallah is 35 miles from Tel Aviv, 60 miles from Gaza, and less than 120 miles from the Lebanese border -- the daily reality is fragmented. Israel prevents most Palestinians from traveling between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, into Jerusalem, and through large areas of the West Bank, resulting in major disparities in economic and political conditions. Many Gaza residents struggled last week to survive the summer heat without electricity and water -- both casualties of Israel's bombardment of Gaza's infrastructure -- and were subjected nightly to window-shattering sonic booms by Israeli jets. Meanwhile, Ramallah, spared the sonic booms by the close proximity of Israeli settlements, was surreally quiet.

To be sure, Israeli army units routinely entered Ramallah while I was there, in just one night arresting more than 20 Palestinians in their homes. But these abductions elicited no fanfare in the international press, no angry demand for their immediate release from President Bush, no retaliatory shower of missiles. In fact, with almost 10,000 Palestinians languishing in Israeli prisons and detention centers, many without charge, the arrests barely raised an eyebrow.

But even if Ramallah seemed quiet, it was anything but disconnected. Everywhere I went, people were glued to television screens, as ubiquitous in Palestinian cafes and shops as they are in U.S. sports bars, watching Al-Jazeera's nonstop coverage of the mounting death and destruction with horror and grief.

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What they saw looked familiar. In 2001 and 2002, Israel responded to suicide bombings by Hamas and other groups with a military campaign against the Palestinian Authority that caused massive destruction to the West Bank's newly built physical infrastructure. The invasion also killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians -- deaths made no less painful by Israeli government assurances that its army does not target civilians. These military operations and Israel's system of movement restrictions -- measures adopted in part to impress upon Palestinians the folly of supporting Hamas -- all but destroyed the fragile Palestinian economy, sending Palestinian personal income plummeting by 40 percent in two years. (In comparison, the most that Americans' per capita income dropped during the two worst years of the Great Depression was 20 percent.) As for Hamas, it went on to a sweeping victory in Palestinian legislative elections.

To Palestinians, the results of Israel's military campaign in Lebanon seem no less predictable. One local daily newspaper carried a cartoon depicting the "new Middle East" heralded by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week; it showed Rice in the throes of labor, giving birth to an Islamist gunman. Rapidly growing support for Hezbollah suggests that this new Middle East may not be long in coming.

For just as the problems in the region are connected, so must be their solutions. Palestinians point out the irony behind Israel's emphatic insistence on implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559 in Lebanon when Israel, itself, has refused to implement scores of U.N. resolutions. These resolutions demand, among other things, Israel's withdrawal from Arab lands it occupied in the 1967 Six-Day War and an end to its construction of settlements in occupied territory.

Nothing should delay an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon. But, if that cease-fire is to hold, the elements of an enduring peace must be put in place -- including, above all, an end to Israel's almost 40-year military occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. Within that framework, Israel is entitled to expect neighboring governments to establish a monopoly on the use of force within their territories and to prevent non-state actors from launching cross-border attacks. Their capacity to take these steps, moreover, will be bolstered by an end to Israel's occupation, depriving Syria of its motivation to support Hezbollah and Hamas and depriving both groups of the casus belli that is so central to their popular legitimacy. Without that framework, however, a new Middle East that is more secure and more democratic than the current one will remain a remote prospect.

Omar M. Dajani is a professor of law at the McGeorge School of Law.