at Bush gave to Sharon's abandonment of the "peace process" in favor of "unilateral disengagement" was mostly symbolic, since the Israeli leader was committed to doing it anyway. But in the Middle East, patience is finally running out.

The people of the Arab countries have been remarkably patient as they watched their living standards decline under corrupt and oppressive governments backed by the West. They have been patient as Israel sat on the conquered Palestinian territories for 37 years, pushing Arabs off the land and planting their own settlements on it. They have been patient about a lot of things - but that dry, snapping sound you heard a moment ago may have been the camel's back breaking.

Look at the past month from an Arab perspective. At the end of March, Israel assassinated Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder and leader of the Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas. Sheik Yassin was a staunch supporter of the use of terror against the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory - but he was also an elderly paraplegic who was widely seen as a holy man, and for many years Israel avoided attacking him.

Many Palestinians saw Sheik Yassin's murder as a deliberate attempt by the Israeli government to stimulate terrorist attacks that would distract international attention from Sharon's land grab in the West Bank. The attacks have not yet come. What did come was a statement by Abdel Aziz Rantisi, Hamas' new leader in the Gaza Strip, that "America has declared war on Allah. Allah has declared war on America and Bush."

Rantisi was saying that America's complicity in what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is so great that the United States will also become a target of Palestinian terrorism. Of course, Hamas hasn't even retaliated against Israel for Sheik Yassin's death yet.

Spin forward a week to Iraq, where the ham-fisted mismanagement of the U.S. occupation regime turns the killing of four men in Fallujah and the banning of a small circulation newspaper published by a radical young cleric into two full-scale sieges of major Iraqi cities. No matter what the American military spokesman says, people watching Arab television can see that the makeshift hospitals are full of wounded women and children as well as young men. Perhaps the United States is not the Arabs' enemy, but look at it through Arab eyes.

And, finally, Wednesday at the White House. It was obvious why Sharon, in trouble at home on several fronts, needed Bush's support for his radical plan to pull out of the Gaza Strip (where there are only 7,500 Jewish settlers among 1.3 million Palestinians), but hang onto almost all of the far bigger settlements on the West Bank and confine the Palestinians there behind his "security fence," thus unilaterally settling the new borders of an emasculated Palestinian pseudo-state. It is less clear why Bush had to give it to him.

For 37 years, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have insisted, along with everyone else in the world, that Israel's legal border is the pre-1967 one, and that it can only be changed by freely negotiated agreements between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet there was Bush, with Sharon beaming by his side, announcing a new U.S. policy: "In the light of new realities, including already existing Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."

Not a word about how those "already existing" Israeli population centers were planted there by force after the Israeli military occupation in 1967; not even a nod to the UN resolutions that have been the bedrock on which every previous negotiation was built. There aren't going to be any more peace negotiations, of course, which suits Sharon fine - but why does it suit the United States? Bush's unnecessary concessions to Israel were so effective in alienating Arab opinion that his speech might as well have been ghost-written by Osama bin Laden.

This may not prove to be the final straw, but we are getting very close. For decades the United States has managed to preserve a dominant position in the Arab world despite its permanent disagreement with the Arabs about Israel, but now it is throwing it away. Five or 10 years from now the Middle East may look a lot more like bin Laden's dream than Bush's.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------