Palestinian children in front of the Dar al-Arkam school, damaged by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City in July. (Mohamed al-Zanon, Maan Images)

This weekend, Israel and the Palestinians announced a cease-fire, ending the bloody low-level conflict that has been raging for months and momentarily returning the world's attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The cessation of violence in the Gaza Strip, where about 400 Palestinians and five Israelis have been killed, is a welcome humanitarian development. But any long-term hopes it gives rise to are likely to be cruelly dashed. It addresses none of the underlying issues, and in fact only strengthens rejectionist elements on both sides. Unless the Bush administration moves to broker a lasting Israeli-Palestinian peace, the cease-fire will prove to be yet another temporary lull, and the conflict will worsen, with dire ramifications for the United States.

As the Iraqi debacle lurches from dreadful to nightmarish, with 140,000 U.S. troops caught in a vicious purgatory, it is all too easy to forget that the real "front line of the war on terror" is in Jerusalem, not Baghdad. The Israeli-Palestinian crisis is not a matter that America wants to deal with. There is zero debate about it in Congress, where unswerving support for Israel continues to be the only thing that Democrats and Republicans agree on. It divides the left. It is such an emotional, sensitive issue that most people don't even bring it up. And it's easy to simply dismiss it as intractable.

But like it or not, the fact remains that the now 39-year-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian land continues to be the most incendiary issue in the Arab-Muslim world, the single thing that most inspires hatred of the U.S. A U.N.-sponsored group recently found that tensions between Islam and the West are caused not by religion but overwhelmingly by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has acquired a symbolic significance larger than itself. The conflict affects virtually every problem in the region, including Iraq -- a fact recognized by world leaders from British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Jordan's King Abdullah to the leaders of France, Spain and Italy, who just presented their own peace plan. Until the U.S. brokers a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians -- and only America can do it -- we will stumble impotently around in the Middle East, despised by all except the corrupt despots we prop up, while the anti-American rage that breeds jihadists grows.

The Israeli-Palestinian crisis has long been the elephant in the room of Bush's entire Mideast policy, a subject too fraught to bring up. It is incorrect to say, as some on the left have done, that Bush's Iraq war was fought "for Israel." But it is true that the war was dreamed up by strongly pro-Israel officials and ideologues and that Israel's interests were a significant factor in their decisions. And in a larger sense, the ideology behind Iraq, and Bush's entire "war on terror," is identical to Israel's "iron wall" approach to its Arab enemies -- a fact that has gone largely unremarked upon in the United States.

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Which makes it a matter of considerable historical irony that America now has an opportunity to break through the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock. Precisely because Bush's neoconservative policies have seriously weakened the United States, forced it to pay dearly in blood and treasure, and entangled it in the region like never before, they have opened a window of opportunity on the Israeli-Palestinian front. The pro-Likud hawks from the American Enterprise Institute who brainstormed the Iraq war, as Bob Woodward describes in his new book, surely never dreamed that a war-on-terror strategy right out of the Likud playbook could end up leading the U.S. to make moves on Palestine that under "normal" circumstances it never would -- moves that could save Israel from itself, bring justice to the Palestinians, undercut the growing strength of hybrid resistance/Islamist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and allow moderate Arab regimes to begin to reform.

The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as former President Jimmy Carter argues in his important new book, "Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid," is well known by the parties on both sides, and has been for years. Its key elements are shared, with some variations, by a number of peace plans: the so-called Geneva Initiative, the new European peace plan, and the Saudi peace plan of 2002, which was approved by the Arab League. Those elements can be quickly listed: a two-state solution based on full Israeli withdrawal to its internationally recognized 1967 borders and dismantling of the settlements, with any land swaps to be mutually negotiated. Jerusalem would be the shared capital of both states. A limited number of Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel, with the majority being paid compensation and resettled elsewhere. All Arab countries, and the new Palestinian state, would recognize Israel and renounce violence against it.

Under Bill Clinton's vigorous leadership at Camp David, and later at Taba, the U.S. came close to brokering such a deal. Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak were still negotiating at Taba in January 2001 when Barak, facing elections, suspended the talks. As Carter argues, and Clayton Swisher documents in his thorough study, "The Truth About Camp David," the standard U.S.-Israeli line that Yasser Arafat turned down Barak's "generous offer" and is thus wholly to blame for the collapse of the talks is simply false. Swisher argues that the U.S. and Israel were largely to blame for the fact that the talks were ill-prepared and mutual trust was not established. But even if one puts some of the blame on Arafat for making the perfect the enemy of the good, and holding out for a better deal, as does former Israeli Foreign Minister and peace-talks negotiator Shlomo Ben-Ami (who is broadly sympathetic to the Palestinians and opposed to Israeli colonization of the occupied territories), the basic lineaments of a peace deal remain the same. If peace talks fail the first time, the answer is not to cut off negotiations and continue building settlements, but to try again.

Unfortunately, following the collapse of the Camp David-Taba talks, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took his customary hard line, continuing to build settlements and framing all of his policies, like his ideological soul mate George W. Bush, in terms of "a war on terror." And Bush gave Sharon a green light to do what he wanted. Just 10 days after his inauguration, Bush announced that he was going to break with Bill Clinton's approach to the Middle East and give Sharon a free hand to deal with the Palestinians. In words that sum up the ideology behind his later Iraq adventure, he told his National Security Council, according to Ron Suskind's "The Price of Loyalty," "Sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things."

To read the full article please visit Salon.com.