JERUSALEM – No sooner did President Bush launch a new “road map” for Mideast peace than there ensued one of the bloodiest weeks of Palestinian-Israeli violence in the past three years.

So has the road map already reached a dead end? Should the administration exit this risky highway ASAP?

No way. The president has staked his credibility on remaking the Middle East. With Iraqi reconstruction proving far more difficult than he foresaw, the failure of the road map would make a mockery of the Bush vision.

For the road map to lead anywhere, the administration must grasp realities on the ground.

So far the Bush team has focused on the details of the road map – the first-stage requirement that Palestinians crack down on terrorism while Israel eases living conditions in the West Bank and Gaza. But the debate over how to achieve that crackdown – whether Israel should settle for a cease-fire by Hamas terrorists, or insist that Palestinian authorities demolish the organization – misses the point.

Terrorism won’t be stopped by a Palestinian civil war. (At present, Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas is too weak and would be repudiated by his own people if he tried.) Nor will it be stopped by an Israeli military crackdown. (Ariel Sharon has been trying without success for nearly three years.)

The only way to curb terrorism is to turn the Palestinian public against the suicide bombers. That requires Bush to persuade the Palestinians that a return to peaceful negotiations will lead to a viable state.

Look back in history, to 1996, when bus bombers threatened to blow up the Oslo peace process. Back then, the Palestinian public repudiated the militants and pressured a reluctant Yasir Arafat to crush the military infrastructure of Hamas, leading to a long period of calm. Back then, Palestinians (and Israelis) still believed in the peace process.

Arafat bears much of the blame for its failure since then, deceiving his public and tolerating terrorism. Abbas is very different. At the recent Aqaba summit, he publicly repudiated all terrorism against Israelis. But he has been undercut by Sharon and given insufficient backing by Bush.

Abbas comes to power at a time when Palestinians are literally penned into their cities and towns by Israeli roadblocks. Access roads have been bulldozed and blocked by earth berms; students must walk for miles up and down rocky hills to get to university, and sick people trying to reach hospitals get turned back at Israeli checkpoints.

But Sharon spokesman Raanan Gissin rejects the road map requirement of parallel steps to ease Palestinian conditions and build public support for a new peace process.

“No, no, not parallel steps,” Gissin told me. “First, they have to stop terrorism before the road map is launched.”

One week after the Aqaba summit, Sharon sent Israeli troops into Gaza to try to assassinate Hamas political leader Abdel Azziz Rantisi. This was a political strike – Rantisi doesn’t run military operations – and it undercut Abbas’ credibility with his own people. It also increased Palestinian public support for Hamas, especially since many civilians were injured in the attack.

Reuven Rivlin, a close friend of Sharon and speaker of the Israeli parliament, insists Sharon “is ready to go far to get peace.” Rivlin says Sharon is a pragmatist who “wants to be remembered as one of the greatest Israeli leaders,” whose hero is Israel’s founding father, David Ben Gurion, a warrior who was also willing to compromise with the Arabs.

Rivlin adds, however, that Sharon will not give up the Jordan Valley, or any of Jerusalem, and would at most consider giving up between 42 and 70 percent of the West Bank.

How would contiguity be preserved between disconnected chunks of West Bank land, cut by settlements, settler roads, and fences? Rivlin says Sharon might be willing to “isolate or evacuate about 17 settlements.” That would leave 128 settlements intact.

Gissin says that disconnected Palestinian lands would be linked “in some places by tunnels, in some by bridges, in some by territory.” This long-term vision of Bantustans linked by tunnels bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the old South Africa. It won’t push the Palestinian public to challenge Hamas.

“What people need,” says Palestinian Finance Minister Salam Fayyad, “is to begin to have some faith that we are going to get a real state, not a Mickey Mouse state.” Fayyad, a World Bank veteran with a doctorate in economics from the University of Texas, is emblematic of the new reform Palestinian leadership, a man who is rooting out the financial corruption that developed under Arafat.

Can Bush assure Palestinians that their state will be real? Can he persuade Sharon to give Abbas and Palestinian reformers a chance? Will he guarantee Israeli security with U.S. or NATO troops?

The answers to these questions will determine the road map’s fate.

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