Trouble in the neighborhood

AS PRESIDENT BUSH WAS PREPARING to pay a surprise visit to Iraq, where he arrived Tuesday and where the news lately has broken his way, U.S. interests were taking a beating on another front in the Middle East. Unhappily for the president, the bad news from the West Bank and Gaza -- the site of the proposed Palestinian state that he envisions existing alongside Israel -- is also bad news for the U.S. mission in Iraq.

For some time, progress toward the elusive objective of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement has been frustrated by the schism between Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement and Hamas, the rejectionist Islamic party that took control of the Palestinian parliament and Cabinet in elections in January. The split also has endangered international humanitarian assistance to ordinary Palestinians.

Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist. Such recognition was the price former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had to pay to be taken seriously by the Jewish state and by the United States, and it paid dividends in the 1993 agreement signed on the White House lawn and the creation of the Palestinian Authority. Abbas, Arafat’s heir, has tried to put Hamas on the defensive with his proposal for a July 26 referendum on a two-state solution. Hamas views the proposed referendum as illegal.

Deadlock gave way to open conflict after the death last week of eight Palestinian civilians on a beach in Gaza, initially attributed to a wayward Israeli artillery round. (On Tuesday, Israeli military officials suggested that the blast was caused by an explosive device buried in the sand at some earlier time by either Israelis or Palestinians.) On Monday, Fatah followers ransacked and set fire to the offices of the Hamas-led government in Ramallah on the West Bank and briefly kidnapped a Hamas lawmaker. In Gaza, Hamas fighters attacked a building belonging to a Fatah-dominated police force. Abbas announced a state of alert in all of the Palestinian-ruled territories and ordered a security crackdown.

A Palestinian civil war would be a geopolitical as well as a humanitarian disaster. It would invite further military involvement by Israel, which drew Palestinian ire Tuesday with an airstrike on suspected militants in Gaza that killed eight civilian bystanders. And it would increase support in Israel for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s suggestion that Israel unilaterally draw new Israeli-Palestinian boundaries.

The Bush administration, which has reacted cautiously to Olmert’s proposal, may need to urge both Israel and Abbas to exercise restraint in the next few days -- and not only to preserve its options in that arena. There is also an Iraq connection.

It’s simplistic to argue, as some critics of U.S. foreign policy do, that anti-Americanism in Iraq and the Middle East is grounded exclusively or even primarily in resentment of Israel. But it’s equally simplistic to ignore the fact that the Palestinian cause has been embraced -- sometimes sincerely, sometimes cynically -- by millions of Arabs and Muslims. A bloodbath in the West Bank and Gaza -- even a fratricidal one -- would have ominous echoes for the United States elsewhere, including Iran and, yes, Iraq.