WASHINGTON: When Osama bin Laden spoke to his Middle Eastern audience after the US-led attacks on Afghanistan commenced, he ended with a religious oath linking the lack of peace in the US to the lack of peace in Palestine.

The role of the Palestinian issue in the consciousness of the region is more profound than is readily recognized: It has been central to the collective identity of many Arabs and Muslims over the past half century, in a similar way that Israel has become an integral part of contemporary Jewish identity. Many Jews around the world, for example, may dislike Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, and blame him for some of the troubles with the Palestinians, but they will still support Israel if it is attacked or threatened. Many Arabs and Muslims look at the world through the prism of the Palestinian issue: They pass subconscious judgments on countries or groups they don’t know well, based on their positions on this issue.

In every decade since the 1940s, except for the 1990s, the region witnessed a major war related to Palestine. Two of these wars, in 1948 and 1967, led to such devastating Arab defeats that they affected the collective consciousness of two successive generations; and their impact remains today: The refugee problem of 1948 remains unresolved, and territories occupied in 1967 are still under occupation. Although a major Arab-Israeli war was absent in the 1990s, the Palestinian issue was at the heart of Arab-Israeli negotiations during that decade, and cycles of violence kept it even more in the news. Add to this the religious and symbolic importance of Jerusalem, and it is not hard to understand why Palestine is central in the region’s collective consciousness.

The recent surge of this issue in public consciousness is the result of the violent collapse of peace negotiations. In the 1990s, a moderate could debate an extremist on television and claim that there was a better way than extremism. After the collapse of negotiations, moderates went on the defensive.

We cannot ignore the reality of public sentiment in the region. One can debate whether authoritarian governments can, through repression, withstand its fury, but let us not kid ourselves. Even if they can we will only move from one crisis to another, unless the Palestinian issue is addressed. —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) The Washington Post.