FAILED PEACEMAKERS

The hardest thing for an American president to realize is that there is no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem. Eventually, every administration reaches this despairing conclusion.

The tragedy for President Bush is that he knew this to be true - and yet allowed himself and his administration to involve itself in a mission that he seemed to understand was doomed to end in failure even before it began.

Only now Bush and his team are in a pretty pickle, because the president went out on a very long limb two weeks ago by saying, "I expect results."

He said he wanted Arab states to cease their rhetorical and financial support for homicide bombers. He said he wanted "responsible Palestinians" to serve as negotiating partners. And he said he wanted the Israelis to begin pulling out of the West Bank.

He's not getting results. Saudi Arabian television has been running a telethon to support homicide bombers. The Arab press still publishes vile anti-Semitic trash about Israelis.

There are no new Palestinian interlocutors, and Arafat continues to act as though detonating explosives in Israeli crowds is an acceptable way of expressing grievance.

And the Israelis won't pull out of the West Bank until they've finished the specific mission - rooting out the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure - they began 17 days ago.

Despite the proud talk coming out of the White House about the president's determination not to falter in this regard, the present administration is surely on the verge of throwing up its hands as well.

We've seen it before. In 1983, then-Secretary of State George Shultz saw the rejection of his peace plan by Jordan and watched impotently as Syria basically took over Lebanon. He decided to pick up his chips and play the geopolitical game elsewhere.

Some, like the Carterites and the first Bushies, leave office convinced the Israelis are the primary party at fault. By contrast, the Clinton administration, which dedicated itself as no other administration ever has to the Israeli-Palestinian mess, finally accepted the truth in its last week.

"You are a great man," a fawning Yasser Arafat told Bill Clinton after rejecting two wildly generous offers in 2000 for a state, one at Camp David and one at Taba. "The hell I am," Clinton told Arafat, according to Newsweek. "I am a colossal failure and you made me one."

But Arafat didn't make Clinton a failure. Clinton made Clinton a failure - by indulging in a seductive fantasy of peacemaking.

The American desire to make peace in troubled situations is a noble one. It's an example of the very best in the American spirit, because it assumes that everyone in the world is just like us and wants what Americans take for granted: peace, comity and freedom.

The Israelis are very much like us - so much so, in fact, that throughout the '90s the vast majority of the Israeli people were willing to take some astonishing risks for peace.

The Arabs are not like us, and certainly not the Palestinians. They do not place an overwhelming value on peace. The Palestinians believe sincerely they are in a war of self-determination and territorial liberation.

For them, peace means defeat - because a genuine peace would lead to a two-state solution. That was the original vision for the region in 1947, as spelled out by the United Nations. The Arabs rejected it then, and they reject it today.

There is no path to real peace at the moment and for the foreseeable future, because the Arab states and the Palestinians are still besotted with a vision of a region free of Jews and a Jewish state.

This reality has not only made a hash of the Powell trip. It has hit hard with American Jewry as well.

After 20 years in which diaspora Jews increasingly seemed to lose their feeling of profound connection with Israel, the sense of connection has suddenly made itself manifest yet again - as yesterday's rally in Washington demonstrated.

American Jews have been awakened anew to the crazed, homicidal quality of the anti-Jewish hostility we are blessedly spared here in the United States.

Arab apologists in the United States like to speak of the terrifying power of the pro-Israel lobby. The fact is that this supposed super-lobby has simply not had the influence it once did because American Jews haven't been all that passionate about Israel.

The Jewish community's message to Hussein Ibish and James Zogby and all those Arab-Americans who make their living standing up against the Jewish state: We're back, baby!