Will Islamic fundamentalists cease to hate, resent or yearn for ways to strike at the Great Satan because something resembling a functioning Palestinian state is finally established bordering Israel? Or is the Palestinian cause more a handy pretext for hostility that has more to do with deep cultural differences - and the United States being in Middle Eastern lands, oilfields and faces and willing to strike militarily to drive home the point? I suspect the latter.

It also seems less than obvious that the establishment of a Palestinian nation-state (a culture-specific Western European institution shoehorned onto a culture whose concepts of governance have never included democracy or parliamentary rule) will reduce hostility between Israelis and Palestinians. It might well increase the tension and in any event is unlikely to be a stable or stabilizing institution.

Nonetheless, we are about to embark on yet another attempt by the United States and the "international community" to impose/facilitate/bully an agreement that can be spun as peace between Israelis and Palestinians. This time it's called the "road map" and President Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are said to be firmly committed to it.

Our leaders have not yet deigned to reveal the details (or detours) of the road map. But its outlines are likely to resemble what former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat in 2000, with a few changes suggested by the unrelenting mutual hostility since then: an end to terror bombings by Palestinian militants, an end to Israeli military incursions into the West Bank and Gaza, the establishment of a formal Palestinian state (with East Jerusalem as a capital implied but left vague) and some kind of mutual non-aggression agreement.

Peace processors seem to believe that the de facto replacement of Yasser Arafat as the real Palestinian boss and an agreement to remove some, most or all of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank will be the keys to getting it done this time. Would that it were so simple.

On Thursday two events seemed to capsulize the dilemma. Newspapers carried stories of an agreement, after a week or so of tussles that may or may not have been more orchestrated than genuine, on a new Palestinian Authority cabinet between Arafat and the prime minister he appointed under pressure from the U.S. and Europe, longtime PLO loyalist Mahmoud Abbas. And a suicide bomber, identified in early news reports as from "a breakaway faction of a militia linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement," killed a guard and injured 10 bystanders at a train station in the Israeli town of Kfar Saba.

It was a familiar pattern: a step that might - just might - lead toward peace followed by a terrorist attack designed in part to stave off agreement. That's been fairly typical in recent years.

It tends to validate what Jerrold Green, director of the Center for Middle East Public Policy at RAND in Santa Monica, told me the previous day. "I doubt that conditions are ripe yet for an agreement," Dr. Green, who has taught Middle East studies at UCLA and USC, told me. "And unless the two parties are ready for peace, outside forces cannot impose it successfully."

There's the additional complication that not all of Washington - heck, not all of the Bush administration - has signed on to the latest road map. Secretary of State Colin Powell earlier told a Washington Post columnist that President Bush will push Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon hard, especially on the issue of Israeli settlements. That is viewed as a key to credibility among Palestinians and other Arabs.

But the Defense Department faction symbolized by Douglas Feith and Richard Perle (who have directly advised the Israeli Likud party on how to be more effectively hard-line) doesn't want to pressure Sharon, only Arafat. This week former House Speaker Newt Gingrich took the role of point man in the predictable campaign to undermine what hard-liners call the "road map to nowhere."

Is agreement possible? Perhaps eventually, when both sides get war-weary enough and see something to be gained by agreement. But the likelihood that the quartet ofthe European Union, the United Nations,Russia and the United States will get it done this year is pretty low.

Israelis and Palestinians have been negotiating and blustering for decades now, and both know the hot buttons that will serve as deal-breakers for the other side. Here's my guess.

As long as Palestinians insist on a "right of return" for Palestinian refugees from 1948 to resettle within Israel, we'll know they're not looking for peace. The Israelis will never agree to that.

And until the Israelis agree to a substantial dismantling of the existing Jewish settlements in the West Bank (or what some Israeli parties still call Judea and Samaria), we'll know they are not serious about seeking a peace agreement but maneuvering.

Don't hold your breath.