Another excellent column by Caroline Glick looks at the cases where Bush and Carter converge.

…Suddenly this week we have the Bush administration, less than three months before the presidential elections, demanding that Israel not build in Ma’aleh Adumim. We have State Department officials and spokesmen skewering Israel for announcing plans to build 600 more housing units in the city with more than 30,000 residents. According to Ha’aretz, we even have a senior administration source threatening that “When President Bush is elected for a second term he will no longer treat [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon as he did the first term.” And it isn’t only the State Department. According to press accounts, Elliott Abrams, the National Security Council’s point man for Israel and the Palestinians arrived here Wednesday armed with strong words for Prime Minister Sharon the gist of which is, “Stop building in the settlements, or else.” The Bush administration’s anger at the plan to build in Ma’aleh Adumim is wrong for three reasons. First of all, it makes no sense in the context of the administration’s stated policy toward Israel. The Bush administration’s policy toward the Palestinian war with Israel is that the Palestinians must reform to the point where they become an anti-terrorist democratic society. Once that happens, the US will support the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state that will exist west of the Jordan River and live at peace with Israel.

In the unlikely event that such a transformation of Palestinian society were to occur within the next generation, it is impossible to understand why an additional six hundred Israeli families living in the city of Ma’aleh Adumim will be a problem to anyone. If the Palestinians are democratic and anti-terrorist and therefore willing to live at peace with Israel, then they would surely be able to accept that Ma’aleh Adumim is one of the places beyond the 1949 cease-fire lines that will remain part of Israel forever. And if they cannot accept that position but rather insist that Ma’aleh Adumim belongs under Palestinian sovereignty, then surely a democratic, anti-terrorist Palestinian state won’t have a problem with the ten percent of Palestine which is Jewish just as Israel doesn’t have a problem with the Israeli Arabs who make up twenty percent of the Israeli population.

Read it all; there’s too much here to sum up easily. But here’s another on-target observation:

The Palestinian jihad against Israel is part and parcel of the global jihad against the West. The war on Israel is no different in means or ends than the war taking place in the Philippines or Afghanistan or Iraq. And the need for stalwart, continuous pressure to be applied harshly on both the terrorists and the regimes that support them, which informs US policy everywhere else in the world, is needed in the case of the Palestinians. When America calls for Israel to compromise, or insists on engaging every single member of the Palestinian Authority except for Arafat, it is shooting itself in the foot. The notion that the 13 separate terrorist militias that Arafat formed since 1994 under the guise of “security services” can be magically transformed into normal, anti-terrorist police forces once they are collapsed into three militias run by an Arafat lackey as opposed to Arafat himself, is absurd.

And Muhammed Dahlan, the Bush administration’s “great white hope” for Palestinian reform is just as much of a terrorist as Arafat. Their dispute is not over the jihad. It is a rivalry between thieves who can no longer figure out a way to share their loot. So it is that in an interview last week, Dahlan did not hesitate to express his sympathy for the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, Fatah’s terrorist arm. “I am proud of defending them every time it was necessary. They are familiar [and the Palestinian people] are proud of their heroic operations, which brought dignity to the Palestinian people,” Dahlan said.