What do you say about a policy toward the Israel-Palestinian conflict that helps Islamic radicals, hurts Israel and undercuts America’s campaign for Mideast democracy?

I’d say it made no sense. Yet the White House seems wedded to such a policy – at least through Election Day.

You can sum up the Bush approach to this bloody conflict in two words: Do nothing. There’s plenty of presidential rhetoric about a “road map” to peace that supports the creation of a Palestinian state. But the White House has provided minimal follow-through.

The administration blames the impasse on Yasser Arafat. Yes, he’s a failed leader who exploded the Palestinians’ best chance to get a state and never made a serious effort to halt terror bombers.

But the White House wasted opportunities to bolster better Palestinian leaders and makes Arafat the excuse for its passivity. Without U.S. intervention, the chance for a two-state solution is slipping away.

If Israel is left in permanent control of 3.5 million bitter West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, Arabs will soon outnumber Jews within Greater Israel. Israel will have two choices: maintain apartheid rule or give every adult the vote and cease to be a Jewish state.

So why has the Bush team let Israel/Palestine drift toward a one-state solution? In part, to please its conservative Christian base. In part, because the administration nourished the illusion that an Iraq victory would solve all other Mideast problems. And in part, because the Bush team seems to have bought the arguments of Israeli leader Ariel Sharon that he can unilaterally create an ersatz Palestinian state.

The White House has stood by while Sharon expanded Jewish settlements on the West Bank. Now he is building a long security wall through the West Bank. Few would object to a security fence along the de facto 1967 border, but this is a political wall whose route will zig and zag to protect settlements inside the West Bank. Once completed, the barrier, plus roads linking settlements to Israel proper, will bisect the West Bank into cantons that pen Palestinians inside less than half the West Bank.

Sharon understands the demographic danger Israel faces. That is why he is also proposing a unilateral withdrawal from all or most of Gaza, and the dismantlement of some of the more exposed Jewish settlements. Sharon’s vision is to hand Gaza and the West Bank cantons over to the Palestinians – making clear that this is all they will get for many, many years.

But these hemmed-in areas won’t compose a state, even though U.S. officials are pondering how to bill Sharon’s ideas as a peace process advance. In fact, a unilateral Israeli pullback would be the end of the two-state approach.

If Israel withdraws from Gaza without negotiating with the Palestinian Authority, Hamas Islamists will seize control and claim their bombs pushed Israel out. This will embolden radicals on the West Bank.

Locked inside cantons, Palestinians would remain impoverished. The Palestinian Authority would likely collapse, leaving no one to negotiate with in the future.

Ironically, a Gaza First deal might have weakened Arafat had it been handled differently. Had Washington pressed Sharon to offer the deal months ago to moderate Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, the latter might have won sufficient popular support to stand up to Arafat. Instead, Sharon and the Americans let Abbas down and he finally quit.

Now the president must again decide: Does he want to help the Islamists, or keep the peace process going? Bush can still tell Sharon that a Gaza withdrawal must be part of a deal that strengthens current Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and undercuts Arafat. Bush can demand that settlement outposts be dismantled, even as he demands that a strengthened Qurei break up terrorist cells. The West Bank security fence must be straightened, not because of any World Court verdict, but because it must not preclude two states.

Only intense White House involvement can save Israel from heading toward a one-state disaster.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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