Other puzzling statements from Bush’s office over the escalating Israeli aggression against Palestinians mirror an unending scuffle between the radical hawks of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the Realpolitikers, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

However, a string of successes for the hardliners and some militant-like Washington officials in many previous major foreign-policy issues show the strengths of Rumsfeld and his ally, Vice President Dick Cheney, along with the insistent pressure crusade, led by pro-Likud forces to link Palestinian President Yasser Arafat to Bush's larger “war against terrorism”.

''Each period of Palestinian restraint was greeted with Israeli assassinations, home demolitions or incursions into Palestinian territory,'' wrote Mideast veteran Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post last week.

For months, groups like the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have played a steady drumbeat, chiefly through the Wall Street Journal and the Weekly, attacking Arafat and his Arab allies, belittling Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's peace initiative, and pressing the administration to shun the inclination to rein in far-right Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

As Sharon's tanks were imposing their blockade of Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah last week, the Journal, an increasingly right-wing newspaper that is based in New York, suggested that the only way out was "to let the two sides confront each other until they decide they have no choice but to talk again. This means letting Israel defend itself against the kind of terror that Mr. Bush would never tolerate if it took place in New York. If that includes the exile of Mr. Arafat, so be it.''

But the Washington Post noted Tuesday that five days into Israel's biggest military incursion on the West Bank since 1967, “the only daylight between American and Israeli positions appears to be over whether Arafat himself should be considered a terrorist''.

Many foreign journalists here say that they feel that the administration's actions have given an effective green light to Sharon, much as former president Ronald Reagan gave him a green light to invade Lebanon up to the suburbs of Beirut 20 years ago when the Israeli war-fan served as defense minister.

The hawks and their pro-Likud allies in Congress and the media have productively pressed the State Department to further link the Palestinians to Bush's wider, anti-terrorist agenda by listing Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, which is loosely associated with Arafat's Fatah organization, as terrorist groups.

Kathleen Christison, author of the just-released “Perceptions of Palestine: Their Influence on U.S. Middle East Policy” and a former CIA political analyst, said Tuesday that the U.S. foreign policy did not face what the Palestinians really wanted.